Far fewer companies are planning for “enterprise-wide” AI solutions in 2020 than were a year ago, according to a new report from PwC. Only four percent of companies surveyed said they are planning to deploy AI across their entire organization in the coming year compared to 20 percent of executives who said that last year. The global consultancy attributes this to a realization that they do not yet have a good enough understanding of AI fundamentals and to try to scale those solutions across their organization would be premature.
PwC predicts this will be an opportunity for RPA, however, which the report identifies as “boring AI” and of several more “mundane” technology that can still yield productivity gains while companies struggle with more complex artificial intelligence deployments. Thirty-five percent of organizations polled for the report said AI that automates routine tasks is one of the top five AI capabilities firms should target while they try to get a handle on how to deploy AI at scale.
“Much of the excitement next year will come from incremental productivity gains for in-house processes. For your company’s bottom line, automating routine tasks in administrative functions, such as tax and finance, is anything but boring,” the report’s authors wrote. “Companies can see remarkable savings from (for example) using AI to extract information from tax forms, bills of lading, invoices, and other documents that typically require long and tedious hours of human work. Such quick wins are a good way to start, but AI can do much more, even when it comes to automating routine tasks.”