2024 Cloud Complexity Report: The AI Divide

The rise of AI is creating a new disrupt-or-die era and the world is starting to divide into AI leaders and AI laggards.

There is already a clear divide between AI-leading countries and AI-lagging countries. Sixty per cent of companies in AI-leading countries (India, Singapore, UK, USA) have either committed to AI projects that are already up and running or are in pilot. In AI-lagging countries (Spain, Australia/New Zealand, Germany, Japan) that average is only 36%, and Japan trails at a mere 17%.

There is also a clear divide between AI-leading and AI-lagging industries. It’s no surprise that the Technology sector is leading in innovation and AI – with the most AI projects either in pilot or up and running (70%), but Banking & Financial Services and Manufacturing are also AI leaders with 55% and 50% of AI projects either in pilot or up and running, respectively. While Healthcare is at 38% and Media & Entertainment is only at 25%, both are starting to fall behind.

The same is true for large companies versus smaller ones. Sixty-two per cent of companies with more than 250 employees have AI projects either in pilot or up and running versus 36% for companies with less than 250 employees. Additionally, data scientists and data engineers are embracing AI faster than the C-Suite.

However, there is hope for the laggards. AI-lagging geographies, industries and companies can still catch up to AI leaders – but they’ll need to act fast. AI laggards with IT environments already optimized for AI (with unified data storage) will be able to adopt AI quicker, while those with siloed data environments have more barriers to overcome.

IT costs and security are the two biggest challenges in the AI era, but they will not impede AI progress. Instead, AI leaders will scale back, cut other IT operations or reallocate costs from other parts of the business to fund AI. Leaders will also increase their cloud operations (CloudOps), data security and AI investments throughout 2024.

Finally, whether you’re an AI leader or an AI laggard, the report confirmed five key areas equally critical to AI success:

1. Rich, connected and accessible data 
2. An AI-trained workforce
3. The right AI partners 
4. Access to high-performance computing and storage
5. Visibility and control over CloudOps and cost

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