Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is likely to play a critical role in addressing skills shortages in today’s marketplace, according to a new study by London-based Kaspersky Research. It showed that 40% of 2,000 C-level executives surveyed plan to use genAI tools such as ChatGPT to cover critical skills shortages through the automation of tasks.
The European-based study found genAI to be firmly on the business agenda, with 95% of respondents regularly discussing ways to maximize value from the technology at the most senior level, even as 91% admitted they don’t really know how it works.
“If there’s a desire to delegate critical activities and functions to genAI, it is essential that senior management first develops a deeper understanding of the data management processes, including what data can and cannot be used to train these systems,” said David Emm, Kaspersky’s principal security researcher.
GenAI offers a much lower barrier than finding new workers, which is attractive to senior bosses looking to solve critical business challenges, Kaspersky’s study revealed.
More than a quarter of those surveyed, however, called genAI a fad, comparing it to Meta’s recently launched Threads app — an upstart competitor to X/Twitter. “These leaders stated that they believe Gen AI to be just another fad [that] challenges for dominance quickly and then dies off just as fast,” the Kaspersky study said.
Even so, 49% of those surveyed believe employees are already automating everyday tasks such as generating email content.
While genAI offers the promise of clear business benefits, education is key and collaboration with cybersecurity and risk experts is needed to help establish an environment where the technology can be used safely, securely, and productively, according to Emm.
Hurdles to adopting AI persist. Those issues include high costs, uncertain return on investment (ROI), the need to upskill entire staffs, and potential exposure of sensitive corporate data to unfamiliar automation technology.
Few organizations, however, have put appropriate safeguards in place to guard against some of genAI’s most well-known flaws, such as hallucinations, exposure of corporate data, and data errors. Most are leaving themselves wide open to the acknowledged risks of using genAI, according to Kaspersky. For example, only 22% of C-level executives have discussed putting rules in place to regulate the use of genAI in their organizations — even as they eye it as a way of closing the skills gap.
Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn, whose team is working to embed AI in back-end systems and products, said it’s critical to have the policies, security, and legal guardrails in place to be able to “safely adopt and embrace AI capabilities other vendors are rolling out into other people’s tools.
“You can imagine all the SaaS vendors…, everybody’s on this journey,” Previn said in a recent interview. “But are we set up to take…
2023-12-05 18:41:03
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn