Four-fifths of companies will be using GenAI by 2026

The rise of generative AI is set to accelerate even faster, with Gartner predicting that four-fifths (80%) of business will either be using the technology or will have developed their own tools by 2026.

While the market has been in a frenzy since ChatGPT was released in November last year, the 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle for Generative AI maintains that less than 5% of businesses are currently using the technology.

It means that the number of businesses that adopt or create generative AI models will have grown sixteenfold within just three years.

Gartner distinguished VP analyst Arun Chandrasekaran said: “Generative AI has become a top priority for the C-suite and has sparked tremendous innovation in new tools beyond foundation models, with demand increasing for generative AI in many industries.”

The report cites sectors such as healthcare, life sciences, legal, financial services and the public sector, while a recent study by app security specialist Indusface claimed that advertising and marketing were leading the way.

Meanwhile, Gartner identifies key technologies that are increasingly embedded into many applications. Specifically, three innovations that are projected to have a huge impact on organisations within ten years include GenAI-enabled applications, foundation models and AI trust, risk and security management (AI TRiSM).

GenAI-enabled applications use the technology for user experience (UX) and task augmentation to accelerate and assist the completion of a user’s desired outcomes. As applications become enabled with GenAI, this will permeate a wide spectrum of skill sets within the workforce.

Chandrasekaran added: “The most common pattern for GenAI-embedded capabilities today is text-to-X, which democratises access for workers, to what used to be specialised tasks, via prompt engineering using natural language. However, these applications still present obstacles such as hallucinations and inaccuracy that may limit widespread impact and adoption.”

“Foundation models are an important step forward for AI due to their massive pretraining and wide use-case applicability. Foundation models will advance digital transformation within the enterprise by improving workforce productivity, automating and enhancing customer experience and enabling cost-effective creation of new products and services.”

Gartner predicts that by 2027, foundation models will underpin 60% of natural language processing use cases, which is a major increase from fewer than 5% in 2021.

Chandrasekaran continued: “Technology leaders should start with models with high accuracy in performance leaderboards, ones that have superior ecosystem support and have adequate enterprise guardrails around security and privacy.”

AI TRiSM ensures AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, efficacy and data protection. It includes solutions and techniques for model interpretability and explainability, data and content anomaly detection, AI data protection, model operations and adversarial attack resistance.

It is an important framework for delivering responsible AI and is expected to reach mainstream adoption within two to five years, Gartner predicts. By 2026, organisations that operationalise AI transparency, trust and security will see their AI models achieve a 50% improvement in terms of adoption, business goals and user acceptance.

Chandrasekaran concluded: “Organisations that do not consistently manage AI risks are exponentially inclined to experience adverse outcomes, such as project failures and breaches.

“Inaccurate, unethical or unintended AI outcomes, process errors and interference from malicious actors can result in security failures, financial and reputational loss or liability, and social harm.”

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