A new survey from ABBYY has found that 58% of companies are worried they will be left behind if they don’t use AI – thus driving their primary motivations for investment.
The average investment cost in AI reached £730,000 in the last year. Despite this, almost all UK respondents in ABBYY’s survey confessed they plan to increase AI investment within the next year.
85% of UK respondents reported an overwhelmingly high level of trust in AI tools. The most trustworthy according to decision makers was small language models (SLMs) or purpose-built AI (92%), with 44% of UK respondents already using purpose-built AI such as intelligent document processing (IDP).
Meanwhile the UK’s use of generative AI was the highest of the regions surveyed, with over three quarters saying they use it compared with 65% globally.
“It’s no surprise to me that organisations have more trust in small language models due to the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate and provide inaccurate and possibly harmful outcomes,” said Maxime Vermeir, senior director of AI strategy at ABBYY.
“We’re seeing more business leaders moving to SLMs to better address their specific business needs, enabling more trustworthy results.”
Just over half of respondents said they would feel more confident knowing their company had a responsible AI policy, while 55% said having knowledge of which AI regulations the company needs to comply with was also cited as a confidence booster – compared with 49% globally.
The survey revealed the top fears for IT leaders implementing AI were misuse by their own staff and the cost, both 37%. These came ahead of concerns about data protection (36%), AI hallucinations (35%), and even compliance risk (32%).