GenAI Drives ROI in Enterprises: Dataiku & Databricks Survey

Dataiku and Databricks have released new survey findings showcasing how Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping enterprise operations, highlighting its growing role in business strategy. The survey, conducted in May 2024, gathered insights from 400 global senior AI professionals and revealed that 65% of respondents are seeing positive financial returns from their GenAI projects. This points to both the strategic importance and profitability of AI investments.

The survey results also indicate that 90% of AI leaders are currently investing in GenAI. Among these, 57% have integrated GenAI into their IT and data science budgets, while 33% have created new budget lines specifically for GenAI initiatives. This demonstrates a significant shift in how businesses are prioritizing AI as a critical component of their operations.

Despite the growing optimism around GenAI, the survey uncovered several persistent challenges. Data quality remains a top obstacle, with 58% of respondents citing it as a major issue. Additionally, businesses are facing GenAI-specific hurdles, such as a lack of resources (44%), employee knowledge gaps (28%), and IT or policy constraints (22%).

The findings also highlight a decrease in extreme concerns about AI, dropping from 10% in 2023 to just 4% in 2024. Over half (56%) of AI leaders now believe that the C-suite has a better understanding of the risks and benefits of AI, a 17% increase from the previous year.

Leaders from both Dataiku and Databricks commented on the survey results. Conor Jensen, Global Field CDO at Dataiku, noted that businesses are increasingly embracing GenAI and quickly seeing returns on their investments. Prem Prakash, Head of AI Marketing at Databricks, emphasized the importance of helping organizations overcome challenges by unlocking the full potential of their data to build secure, domain-specific AI systems.

The survey also explored how AI leaders are adopting large language models (LLMs) as part of their GenAI strategy. It found that 85% of respondents are either using or exploring hosted LLM services due to their ease of integration. Additionally, 56% are experimenting with self-hosted open-source LLMs, which offer greater flexibility and address security concerns. Furthermore, 65% of respondents are trialing other GenAI models, such as multimodal, video, and image models, to gain a competitive edge.

As enterprises continue to integrate GenAI into their business strategies, the findings show a clear trend toward increasing investment and growing confidence in AI’s ability to drive meaningful outcomes, despite ongoing challenges.