Lack of skills a bump in the road to AI adoption

According to Peter Pugh-Jones, head of technology for SAS in the UK and Ireland, organisations will need to hire people with a diverse skill set in order to advance their artificial intelligence capabilities. He said that, for SAS, the ideal person would have a grounding in an area such as analytics and have the willingness to diversify into other areas. His comments come after the publication of a survey of enterprises about AI-readiness carried out by SAS that revealed a sense of optimism, but also organisational challenges that would accompany adoption. One of the biggest challenges was reported to be jobs - both the loss of existing jobs due to AI and the difficulty in filling the new jobs necessary to develop AI capabilities. When asked, "what are you experiencing or expect to be the biggest challenges with deployment of AI in your organisation",' 26% said it was a skills challenge or the lack of data scientists and 19% reported that they have no data science team in place.