AI adoption advances, but foundational barriers remain

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking hold across global business, according to a new McKinsey Global Survey on the topic. 1 1. The online survey was in the field from February 6 to February 16, 2018, and garnered responses from 2,135 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent's nation to global GDP. AI, typically defined as the ability of a machine to perform cognitive functions associated with human minds (such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, and problem solving), includes a range of capabilities that enable AI to solve business problems. The survey asked about nine in particular, 2 2. The nine capabilities are natural-language text understanding, natural-language speech understanding, natural-language generation, virtual agents or conversational interfaces, computer vision, machine learning, physical robotics, autonomous vehicles, and robotic process automation (RPA).