An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink.
Similar majorities agreed that their organization's success over the next three years will be highly contingent on their ability to effectively deploy AI (94%) and the emergence of AI would require them to invest in more tailored digital adoption support than they can currently provide (94%).
The research found deep concerns among IT leaders around whether their coworkers have the digital dexterity needed to adapt to the AI era. In particular:
- 96% said that they would need to enhance their digital adoption support to help employees adapt to AI.
- 88% agreed that users were more likely to be daunted by new technologies such as generative AI.
- 92% believe that digital friction is going to increase in the coming years.
- On average, IT leaders believe that less than half (47%) of employees have the requisite digital dexterity to adapt to inbound technological changes.
"The AI era is going to be a radical break from previous waves of digital transformation," said Vedant Sampath, CTO at Nexthink. "Unlocking the potential of AI is going to be the competitive differentiator of the next decade, but this research shows that businesses face a huge challenge in upskilling their employees to meet the moment. Otherwise, executives risk finding themselves having spent millions of dollars on software and IT services that are just gathering dust."
Respondents were almost unanimous in their view that AI is set to transform the way their business operates (96%), and that digital dexterity will be integral to organizational success in the near future (95%), while a large majority (82%) also reported that failing to appropriately invest in AI would result in them falling behind competitors.
However, there is broad awareness that realizing ROI on such investments may be difficult, with 93% acknowledging that they need to improve their ability to identify underperforming digital investments while 91% feel that it will be necessary to invest in AI tools specifically to monitor and enable adoption of other AI tools.
"Managing the transition to the AI era is going to require businesses to be smart around digital adoption," added Sampath. "Having application owners act as knowledge gatekeepers is neither efficient nor scalable. Instead, businesses need to provide employees with timely context-relevant assistance for the task they are performing, in addition to application monitoring, and real-time resolution when issues occur."
