A survey by UBS involving 125 IT executives highlights the strong presence of NVIDIA (NVDA, Financial), Microsoft (MSFT), and OpenAI in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Notably, all surveyed companies are actively investing in AI, with 100% engaged in at least the exploratory and use-case discovery stages. Furthermore, 61% have adopted AI products and applications in specific business areas, an increase from 52% six months ago.
However, UBS analyst Karl Keirstead notes that only 11% of organizations have scaled AI projects into actual applications within 18-24 months of the rise of generative AI. The majority, 89%, plan significant implementations by late 2025 or 2026, leading to disappointment among investors expecting substantial AI-driven growth by early 2025. The primary barrier to AI adoption is unclear return on investment (ROI).
Despite AI investments, overall IT budget growth is expected to remain modest, dropping from an anticipated 5.6% increase last year to 4.4% by 2025. In AI hardware, NVIDIA leads, with 66% of respondents using NVIDIA GPUs for inference, up from 50% in May. Amazon's (AMZN) AWS Trainium chip holds a 17% market share, with AMD (AMD) ranking third. Microsoft Azure dominates AI workload cloud services, with 75% of respondents using it for generative AI applications, an increase from 71% previously.
While AI tools for programming boost productivity, the gains are mild. Only 40% of respondents saw less than a 10% increase, and 32% reported a 10-20% enhancement. Despite claims by Microsoft that GitHub Copilot boosts productivity by over 50%, just 2% of survey participants noted over 30% improvement, with an average productivity increase of 14%, slightly below past surveys' 16%.
