Three months after the summit for action on artificial intelligence organized in Paris in February, the impact on the field remains limited.
What inheritance for the summit for AI action? In an OpinionWay survey for Elastic, 400 managers or CIOs from private sector representative of more than 50 employees were interviewed to find out. And the observation is heavy. Despite a good notoriety of the event, the concrete impact on organizations remains marginal. Only 7% of companies say they have changed their artificial intelligence strategy following government announcements. For the remaining two thirds (66%), the summit has changed absolutely nothing when they approach AI. Even more worrying: more than a quarter of French companies (27%) recognize that they have no strategy at all, revealing structural delay.
Lack of resources, the main blocking factor
What are the main brakes on the generalized adoption of AI? First, it is the question of means, specialized talents, infrastructure and funding, which is mainly returned. More than half of managers (56%) believe that their access to the resources necessary to develop AI projects remains “too limited”. Only 20% of companies say they have specialized talent, infrastructure and funding to build their AI strategy. But the fracture is particularly marked according to the size of organizations. Where 66% of SMEs with 50 to 99 employees say they are helpless, large companies with more than 250 employees are “only” 49% in this situation.
Next comes the second point of blocking the technical difficulties to set up AI. For 57% of organizations having nevertheless taken the step of a strategy dedicated to AI, data control remains the main obstacle. And without quality data, quality IA point: Garbage in, Garbage Out. Finally, the difficulty of the precise return on investment (45%) and the selection of relevant use cases (33%) complete the list of friction.
Aware of these difficulties, the government has announced yet another IA plan endowed with 200 million euros to accelerate adoption and slow down French delay. The system in particular on awareness, training 15 million professionals by 2030, and financial support for companies. The objective? Bring the adoption to 100% of large companies and 50% of very small businesses by 2030. But in view of structural blockages (lack of talents specialized in AI, technical difficulties, difficulty analyzing the king …), these measures may be able to fill an already well installed delay.
