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Lack of skills is # 1 challenge for Saudi enterprises scaling Generative AI finds Nutanix
Nutanix announced the findings of its seventh annual Enterprise Cloud Index, ECI survey and research report, which measures global enterprise progress with cloud adoption. This year ' s report sheds light on Generative Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI adoption, investment priorities, and benefits along with key challenges organisations face to meet the demands of these emerging workloads.
“ As highlighted by the survey results, the adoption of Generative AI presents both significant opportunities and challenges for organisations in Saudi Arabia,” says Talal Alsaif, Sales Director, Central Gulf and North Africa at Nutanix.
This year’ s survey results show that 100 % of Saudi Arabia organisations already have a Generative AI strategy in place, although the level of implementation of that strategy varies: 60 % say they are actively in the implementation phase, which is higher than both the global and EMEA averages.
Respondents in Saudi Arabia cited increased productivity, innovation, automation, and efficiency as the top business-related goals and strategies supported by Generative AI.
Saudi Arabia has a pessimistic long-term outlook when it comes to ROI of Generative AI projects. 26 % expect to break even or make a loss on Generative AI projects over the next year. 35 % expect to break even or make a loss on Generative AI projects over the next 1-3 years. This will be a key challenge for IT decision-makers in Saudi Arabia to address.
Almost 80 % of Saudi Arabia respondents believe Generative AI adoption will be a challenge for their organisation, driven primarily by gaps in skills, experience. 98 % face challenges when it comes to scaling Generative AI workloads from development to production.
The # 1 challenge organisations in Saudi Arabia face when scaling Generative
Talal Alsaif, Sales Director, Central Gulf and North Africa at Nutanix
AI workloads from development into production is lack of skills needed to deploy and operate AI.
Further complicating this skills gap is the fact that 34 % of Saudi Arabia respondents ranked complexity and lack of experience building Generative AI environments from scratch as a Generative AI-related challenge. This lack of Generative AI experience and skillsets are likely key contributors to the fact that 78 % of respondents in Saudi Arabia believe that Generative AI adoption is a challenge for their organisation.
Organisations in Saudi Arabia seem aware of this skills gap, and the need to address these challenges, with 62 % of respondents reporting their organisations need to invest in IT training to support Generative AI applications, workloads over the next 1 – 3 years
In addition to the skills-related challenges that come with Generative AI workload implementation, Generative AI applications themselves present unique challenges associated with data processing, model development, training, and maintenance.
Saudi Arabia ranked privacy and security concerns associated with using LLMs with sensitive company data as their top challenge associated with Generative AI workloads.
In the Fall of 2024, UK researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,500 IT and DevOps, Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including North and South America; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and Asia-Pacific-Japan regions. p
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