75% of Corporate CIOs Say AI Investments "Driving Small Value, But Not Enough"

Despite the relentless hype from big tech that AI IS the future, many corporate customers - as represented by 75% of the corporate Chief Information Officers who are responsible for purchasing AI products and services, then making them work - are saying they have yet to see adequate value from the investments in AI they are making.

In particular, AI agents which are being touted as the most economical and productive means of driving AI utility and value, are considered untrustworthy so far, because they are too unreliable. So while tech appears determined, even emotionally overwrought, about pushing AI, and FOMO drives CEOs and boards to make sketchy AI investments, the professionals who will determine most of AI's revenues and profits remain reserved and unimpressed, if not skeptical. JL

Belle Lin reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Artificial intelligence agents that can perform tasks on behalf of humans, are here. But businesses don’t necessarily trust them, and haven’t yet started using the technology in a widespread way. (Corporations) most pressing concern around the technology is a lack of reliability. 75% of Wall Street Journal CIO Network summit attendees polled said they believe AI is currently driving a small amount of value for their investments, but not enough. (And almost 30%) of attendees at the summit said cybersecurity and data privacy is their primary concern around using AI agents. “They’re so scared to be left out of a revolution that they buy an AI and then try to figure out how to drive value with it”

Artificial intelligence agents, the technology that can perform tasks on behalf of humans, are here. But businesses don’t necessarily trust them, and haven’t yet started using the technology in a widespread way. 

That’s according to attendees at The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network Summit in Menlo Park, Calif. on Tuesday, which attracts the country’s top information-technology leaders.

While 61% of attendees at the summit said they’re experimenting with AI agents, 21% said they’re not using them at all. And, their most pressing concern around the technology is a lack of reliability, the poll found.

That’s in stark contrast to the vendors selling them, who say it will be too late for businesses to wait for all of the technology’s kinks to be ironed out. Vendors like OpenAI, Microsoft and Sierra are banking on the fact that enterprises will be ready sooner rather than later to take on new workforces of AI agents that automate away much of the daily toil for their employees.

 

“Accept that it is imperfect,” Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of the agentic AI startup Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, said at the summit. “Rather than say, ‘Will AI do something wrong’, say, ‘When it does something wrong, what are the operational mitigations that we’ve put in place to deal with it?’”

Not all business technology leaders are ready to take on that risk. Twenty-nine percent of attendees at the summit said cybersecurity and data privacy is their primary concern around using AI agents.

For OpenAI, it’s “too early” for the company to know exactly how customers are using its Operator AI agent, said Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, also speaking at the summit. The company’s agent is capable of autonomously browsing the web, Narayanan said, and its newly released Deep Research agent can synthesize large amounts of internet data.

Wall Street Journal owner News Corp has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

 

Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft, said at the summit that the business software giant’s plan to help companies get value from AI involves combining its Copilot AI assistant with AI agents. “When you use that simple frame, an assistant, Copilot, plus agents, we think you kind of wind up with the right pattern,” he said.

Still, the promise of AI agents—and AI largely—could be even further away than a few years in the future. Seventy-five percent of summit attendees polled said they believe AI is currently driving a small amount of value for their investments, but not enough.

Sometimes, however, companies are in the mode of “having hammers looking for nails,” said Jim Siders, chief information officer of data analytics firm Palantir, also speaking at the summit. 

“They’re so scared to be left out of a revolution in progress that they buy an AI thing of some kind, and they try to figure out how to drive value with it,” Siders said.