New report reveals stark divide in global AI progression

NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, has released its second annual Cloud Complexity Report. The report examines the experiences of worldwide tech decision makers implementing artificial intelligence on a large scale, and reveals a marked difference between AI leaders and AI laggards.

The findings of the report offer invaluable insights into the emerging global trends of AI deployment and the continuing importance of a consolidated data infrastructure in ensuring AI success.

"AI is only as good as the data that fuels it," stated Pravjit Tiwana, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Cloud Storage at NetApp. He continued, "Both the AI leaders and AI laggards show us that in the prevailing hybrid IT environment, the more unified and reliable your data, the more likely your AI initiatives are to be successful."

The report found a clear divide between AI leaders and AI laggards in numerous areas, including regions, industries, and company size. For example, 60% of AI-leading countries (namely India, Singapore, UK, USA) have ongoing or pilot AI projects, in stark comparison with 36% in AI-lagging countries (including Spain, Australia/New Zealand, Germany, Japan).

Reporting on regional AI adoption, Matthew Swinbourne, CTO Cloud Architecture at NetApp Asia Pacific, noted that despite "efficiency and innovation gains offered by AI," there are clear variations in adoption across different regions and sectors. Whichever category a company falls into, "optimizing IT environments before deploying AI must be top of mind to see the best return from investment," said Swinbourne.

Meanwhile, Gabie Boko, Chief Marketing Officer at NetApp, warned, "The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era," and data-ready businesses that integrate diverse structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure stand the best chance of thriving in the era of AI.

Despite the observed gap in AI progression, laggards are showing signs of notable progress in preparing their IT environments for AI, but the window to catch up is rapidly closing, warns the report. Among the top challenges faced in the AI era are rising IT costs and ensuring data security. Nonetheless, these challenges are not likely to block AI progress. On the contrary, AI leaders are expected to scale back, cut other IT operations, or reallocate expenses from other parts of the business to fund AI initiatives.

As investments increase by both AI leaders and laggards, the cloud is becoming increasingly critical to supporting their strategic goals. The report reveals that businesses expect to increase AI-driven cloud deployments by 19% from 2024 to 2030, and 85% of AI leaders plan to enhance their CloudOps automation over the next year. Additionally, data security investments are a global priority, seeing a significant increase of 25% from 33% in 2023 to 58% in 2024.