Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has rapidly expanded over the past year, but AI governance and policies continue to lack maturity, and business leaders are now focused on enhancing security to mitigate potential risks, a recent Juniper Networks research found.

Juniper partnered with Wakefield Research to survey 700 global IT leaders who have direct involvement in their organizations’ AI plans for this year’s AI report. 63% of the respondents stated they are at least “most of the way” through their planned AI adoption goals. Last year, only 6% of surveyed C-level executives said their organizations adopted AI-powered services.  

As AI adoption increases, a nearly all (95%) surveyed leaders agreed that cybersecurity is critical to maintaining and securing enterprise-level AI solutions. Twenty-nine percent said security was the most important component of AI adoption, an increase of 14% in the 2021 report. Meanwhile, 24% of the surveyed this year see cloud availability as the most critical component.

Almost all (96%) of respondents expect AI will help reduce risk and increase quality within their organizations, and business functions such as networking/cloud (25%), IT infrastructure (21%), and supply chain (15%) will benefit most from AI implementation.

AI Governance Lags

However, Juniper’s research also found that security is among the top concerns if AI doesn’t receive appropriate oversight.

The leading top risks are accelerated hacking or AI terrorism and privacy said 55% of those surveyed. 49% chose regulation compliance, and 48% picked loss of human agency, according to the report.

But the reality is that only 9% of them consider their AI governance and policies to be “fully mature,” which include hiring a company-wide AI leader or setting up responsible AI standards and processes. 

Meanwhile, 95% of the respondents saw proper AI governance as a priority to stay ahead of future legislation, up from 87% in last year’s report.

“The disparity the data shows between the substantial increase in AI implementation in the enterprise and the immaturity of AI governance and policies is staggering,” Sharon Mandell, SVP and CIO at Juniper Networks, said in a statement. “It will be critical for governance to pick up the pace so that the positives of AI deployment overshadow existing fears of whether AI can be effectively controlled. This is a challenge not unique to AI, but all emerging technologies.”