New research commissioned by AMD has determined that artificial intelligence (AI) has created meaningful opportunities for organizations to increase productivity, efficiency and security. But the industry's general uncertainty and lack of planning has hindered broader AI adoption.

AMD's survey of 2,500 global IT leaders found 46% of respondents said their organization is unprepared to implement AI. The research found another 44% of IT leaders said their organization will prioritize AI in the next one to five years, and just 19% plan to prioritize AI within the next year.

"The most surprising finding was that only about half of IT leaders say their organizations will prioritize AI in the next year," Matt Unangst, AMD sr. director of commercial client and workstation told SDxCentral. "Given the rapid pace of innovation surrounding AI, this represents a real risk – organizations who do not have a strong focus on AI adoption may fall behind their peers," he argued.

Part of that unpreparedness stems from a lack of experience; more than half of surveyed respondents say they haven't experimented with the latest AI natural language processing apps yet.

The researched identified a host of other roadblocks preventing broader enterprise adoption of AI, including compliance concerns and infrastructure needs, "all of which [are] valid," Unangst pointed out. But as AI shifts further into the mainstream, IT leaders "need to be intentional" about investing in "the right" AI tools and partners, he said.

Even for the significant number of respondents whose organization "has projected on the far end of that five-year timeline, we would urge them to start investing in enabling systems and technologies now," Unangst said. "That includes the right infrastructure to ensure AI workloads can run effectively and efficiently."

Smaller organizations with less than 500 employees, he added, are able to move quickly and are more likely to prioritize AI within the next six months – especially compared to larger organizations with more than 5,000 employees, which likely have longer timelines.

On the other hand, a major roadblock already addressed is leaders' awareness of the benefits to integrating AI technologies. The survey found 68% of leaders agree AI will help work models run more efficiently, and 67% agree AI will increase employee efficiency. "We were pleased to see that optimism for the benefits of AI greatly outweighs concern among IT leaders," Unangst noted.

And of respondents who say they are already prioritizing AI, 90% are seeing the improved workplace efficiency that AI promises. "There is a lot of potential with AI, especially if you look at how it could change the day-to-day experience for employees," Unangst said, citing Microsoft's plans for the AI development assistant Copilot.

The technology's potential also extends to creating personalized and secure experiences "by running AI models locally [to] enhance a laptop's power efficiency," for example, "which means better employee productivity and from anywhere," he explained.