Brazil1 in 3 CEOs unsure about digital transformation roadmap
A third of CEOs surveyed reported being uncertain where exactly they should invest their digitalization budget in order to best create additional value. That is according to a report from AND Digital.
The survey, which questioned 600 executives in the UK, the US, and the Netherlands, additionally found that despite the uncertainty, 55% of business leaders believed that investing in new technologies was a good idea even without clear returns in mind.
CEOs are generally not very confident about the rapidly changing landscape of technology and digitalization. A third of CEOs surveyed said they lacked the proper digital knowledge to lead their organizations to further growth.
When it comes to AI, 44% of CEOs surveyed said their teams are not ready to adopt the technology. A significant number of business leaders (from 25% up to 50%) expressed a readiness to replace parts of their workforce with AI tools if could save them on labor costs.
But implementing AI solutions is not without risks – as everyone knows by now – considering the problems of bias, inaccuracy, and privacy that are inherent to AI. The survey showed that 68% of business leaders are concerned about the ethical considerations of AI.
Despite that, a lot of the business leaders admitted to using ChatGPT or other similar AI applications in their work, without always clearly disclosing it.
“CEOs are increasingly expected to understand and be accountable for technology implementation, a task that previously fell more to CIOs and CTOs,” said Jeroen Kleinhoven, Benelux executive at AND Digital.
“By explicitly embracing technology such as AI, a culture of fear and distrust surrounding new technologies is broken. Retraining people and teams across all departments should be an absolute top priority for every CEO. In this day and age, every company is a technology company, whether they realize it or not.”
A fair amount of companies are already investing in AI and 76% of CEOs reported already investing in training their employees in digital literacy.
A previous report found that three quarters of mid-market businesses increased their investment into AI technologies in the past four years. That is despite the risks and the coming regulations, like the European Commission’s AI Act, which have led some business leaders to prefer waiting until they have a clearer idea of their responsibilities and obligations.
