A recent survey by IDC shows that 37 percent of UAE organisations surveyed are aiming to increase their spending on Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the next 12-18 months. National measures to promote the use of AI and increased understanding of how it can be leveraged to support operational excellence and an engaging customer experience are mostly to credit for this.
By establishing committees and sub-councils to assist it, the UAE Council for Artificial Intelligence works to put into practice the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, which aims to make the UAE a global leader in the field by 2031.
According to the survey, Augmented Analytics tops in the list of AI Applications in Demand across the region for the next year with 48 percent. Behind that is Intelligent Automation, Recommendation Engines and Chatbots & Conversational Agents with 46 percent, 43 percent and 42 percent respectively. The survey also found that one in two UAE organisations have already started their digital transformation journeys before the pandemic began, and that these forward-thinking organisations’ top digital priorities are digitalising operations for productivity improvements, enabling hybrid work models, developing creative digital business models, and utilising digital technologies to achieve environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
To become an AI-first organisation and recalibrate to realise its full potential, IDC gives five maturity traits which evaluates an organisation’s AI readiness. Those traits are as follows:
- Vision: Adaptable enterprise-wide strategy, AI-first culture and alignment with business goals.
- People: AI skillset by redeployment, recruitment and training.
- Process: Orgnaisation wide business process, automation and digitalisation
- Technology: Enterprise platform with access to data, intelligence and MLOps services
- Date Readiness: Date acquisition as a service and real time provision of resources.
Though AI adoption is rapidly increasing in the region, it comes with various challenges to be overcome. Survey suggest that organisations identify finding talents and the cost of implementation as the major challenges in adoption.
Companies will need to figure out how to overcome the AI skills gap so they have specialists on their team to get the job done if they want to move AI initiatives from conception to execution. The academic and training programs is unable to keep up with the rate of innovation and new discoveries in AI, which in turn causes the AI skills crisis. AI specialists require both formal education and practical work experience. As a result, firms that are new to AI implementation strategies lack the experienced AI specialists needed to fill the leadership roles. To bridge this skill gap, many of the tech giants are now investing internationally to expand their talent pool. The UAE AI internship Program also aims at bridging the gap between the skills required in the technology sector and supporting youth and improving their potential to enable them to meet future challenges.
These two are not the only challenges. Some of the other challenge, according to IDC, are lack of single, centralised technology architecture and platform to develop and run AI use cases, data lineage etc.
As many companies are trying to tackle these issues and jump onto this AI trend, GBM is helping clients across data and AI life cycle. They are aiding customers from advising and designing to building an information architecture where enhanced AI uses can be built, implemented and operated. With its ‘Design Thinking’ workshops, the business challenges and goals are analysed with which AI journey can be planned.
