More than half (52%) report ready to adopt AI yet COOs are pushing back

Anvil, a SaaS platform enables companies working with documents to be data-first and AI-ready, released its first AI Readiness & Adoption Report 2023. The report surveyed hundreds of C-suite executives and decision makers which revealed AI adoption to date, sentiment on the importance of AI, the factors considered to implement AI to stay ahead of the competition, and more.

The survey found two major challenges to AI adoption. First, AI adoption within SaaS companies has barely gotten off the ground with only (7%) reporting that their company has already adopted AI capabilities, leaving over (93%) who have yet to do so. In fact, over 7 in 10 (72%) feel their company is at a disadvantage in leveraging AI in comparison to their competitors. Second, over 3 in 5 (61%) agree that they feel like they are drowning in data and unable to use AI to gain actionable insights, compared to less than a quarter (23%) who disagree. Additionally, over 2 in 5 (44%) said they need to clean the data they already have and the same percentage said they need to store their data more effectively, while (42%) reported needing better software solutions to manage their data.

Surprisingly, (74%) say they believe developing AI powered products and services is important to their organization while (77%) said they believe investing in AI infrastructure to be critical, noting that COOs are overwhelmingly the most pessimistic about adoption.

In order to address these challenges, C-suite are implementing a number of tactics, including:

• 14% will allocate 41% – 50% of their budget to AI, however, almost a quarter (24%) said they expect this amount to be spent on AI in the next 5 years.
• 74% will need a third party to assist with AI adoption
• 39% will educate employees on AI compliance & regulation

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Many businesses are also gearing up to embrace AI in the future:

• 81% are using AI to automate tasks
• 32% believe they could get ahead of the competition if they used it to increase talent
• 31% say it would help if it was used to develop new products, services and offerings
• 52% say that their company is somewhat ready to adopt AI capabilities

“The data illustrates that leaders across industries are trying to grasp the impacts of AI on their business. It is a once in a generation technology that could have far ranging effects on how businesses and even entire industries operate,” says Mang-Git Ng, CEO and cofounder of Anvil. “The biggest challenge that AI companies have is helping leaders bridge the gap between AI being a ‘cool technology’ to ‘maximizing value out of AI within the business.’ For many, the key insight is to apply AI to existing workflows within an organization, not creating new workflows in the process of adopting AI.”

In tandem with the report comes the launch of Anvil Document AI, new AI-enabled features that are being integrated into the existing Anvil product. These three major improvements to the Anvil suite of products include:

• AI Field Discovery, where Anvil customers can use AI to automatically identify blanks and inputs that need to be filled in with data on a PDF document.
• AI Field Tagging is a new AI powered inference layer for determining the best label and field type to assign a specific field on a PDF.
• AI Webform Translations, where Anvil is using large language models to power multilingual translations empowering businesses that adopt Anvil to support customers globally.

Such features aim to significantly reduce the effort required in digitizing PDFs and transitioning businesses from a document driven process to a data-first process.

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