Citibank hosted a CIO/CTO forum to gauge enterprise interest in adopting generative AI.
Enterprise CIOs and CTOs say they are evaluating when, not so much whether, they will adopt generative AI, according to a discussion at Citibank.
The banking giant held a CIO/CTO Forum on Generative AI in the Enterprise in New York to assess enterprise interest in generative AI, sponsored by Citi Ventures and ON Partners.
Moderator Matt Carbonara, Managing Director of Citi Ventures, initiated the discussion by asking the panelists to gauge the current adoption level of generative AI in the enterprise.
“Despite the enormous popularity of conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT, most enterprises are either evaluating its significance to them or are in wait-and-see mode,” said Arni Raghvender, Director of Technology at AWS, adding:
- 20% of his customers have a definite sense of urgency. If they don’t do something right now, they risk getting disrupted.
- The bulk of them (other than startups) have assigned small teams to understand the use cases. What does it mean for us, how to get going, etc? Is it a separate thing? Or part of the existing ML/AI team?
- 15-20% are in wait-and-see mode.
The other panelists confirmed Raghvender’s assessment. They included: Nimrod Barak, Global Head of Citi’s Innovation Labs; Chris Coulthrust, Microsoft Senior Cloud Solution Architect; Frank Farrall, Deloitte Principal, Cloud Analytics and AI Ecosystem Digital Transformation; and Barric Reed, Partner at BCG X.
The group also highlighted multiple challenges to enterprise adoption, such as a clear understanding of the ROI of using their own data for a chatbot, unclear legal issues around commercial use, and the risk of a confidential data breach.
On the other hand, they said, companies whose business model was threatened, such as Adobe, responded quickly without waiting to work through the legal issues.
