The majority of industrial manufacturing business leaders (55%) say AI is moving faster than it should in their field, with 49% of retail and tech leaders citing the same concern in their industries, according to a KPMG report published Tuesday. The report surveyed 950 full-time business decision makers and/or IT decision makers. The majority of industrial manufacturing, tech and retail leaders say the pandemic sped up their AI adoption plans. Fields such as government, financial services and healthcare and life sciences cited the pandemic as an accelerant less frequently. In the industrial manufacturing space, 93% of decision makers say AI is moderately to fully functional in their companies, while just 67% of healthcare and 61% of government leaders say the same.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of AI adoption, but many industry insiders find the speed of adoption a bit overwhelming, according to a KPMG survey. The KPMG report, based on a survey of 950 full-time business/IT decision-makers with at least a moderate amount of AI knowledge working at companies with over $1 billion in revenue, analysed the uptake, concerns, and confidence in AI across seven industries – tech, government, retail, financial services, industrial manufacturing, healthcare & life sciences. According to Traci Gusher, Principal of AI at KPMG, industries are experiencing a COVID-19' whiplash' with AI adoption skyrocketing due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, experts have reposed faith in AI's ability to solve significant business challenges. In this article, we look at the rise in AI adoption during the pandemic and the concerns raised by industry professionals, based on the KPMG report.

Real-world AI deployments surged over the past year as companies sought to remain competitive during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study released today by KPMG. However, even as they expanded and accelerated their AI projects, organizations expressed concerns about ethics and bias, and suggested AI might be getting ahead of regulations. KPMG's study, called "Thriving in an AI World," replicates a study conducted before COVID-19 upended our world a year ago. That provided KPMG Principal of AI, Traci Gusher, a convenient baseline to test how AI deployments have been impacted by COVID-19. "Over half the business leaders that we talked to said that AI is at least moderately to fully functional in their organization, which is a significant increase," Gusher says.

A survey published by KPMG today suggests that a large number of organizations have increased their investments in AI during the pandemic to the point that executives are now concerned about moving too fast. In fact, most of the survey respondents cited a definite need for increased AI regulation. The survey covered 950 business decision-makers and/or IT decision-makers with at least a moderate amount of AI knowledge at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue. It finds AI technologies are most likely to be moderately to fully employed in industrial manufacturing (93%), financial services (84%), technology (83%), retail (81%), life sciences (77%), health care (67%), and government (61%) sectors. Survey respondents all cited the pandemic as a factor that drove increased adoption of AI in the last year, though the degree varied by sector from industrial manufacturing (72%) to technology (57%), retail (53%), government (44%), financial services (42%), and health care and life sciences (37%). Many respondents also noted that AI technology is moving too fast for their comfort in industrial manufacturing (55%), technology (49%), retail (49%), life sciences (47%), financial services (37%), government (37%), and health care (35%) sectors.

Companies should be adjusting their data and analytics strategies to better align with market realities as they unfold. Up until a few weeks ago, it was relatively clear that companies needed to become increasingly digital to thrive in an era of rampant industry disruption. Regardless of whether businesses have been shut down or they're operating above or below their normal capacity, every company's data and analytics strategy has been impacted because the underlying data has changed. Customer behavior has changed, supply chain behavior has changed, company operations have changed. If your data and analytics strategy isn't keeping up with what's happening, then you have important work to do, quickly.

Companies are starting to see a few benefits from artificial intelligence, but there are still many roadblocks to progress. In Living in an AI World: Achievements and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence Across Five Industries, KPMG looks at what's working and what isn't in five industries. The report explores how leaders in healthcare, financial services, transportation, technology, and retail are using artificial intelligence (AI) to change operations and workflows. Two findings were not a surprise. A majority of leaders in four of the five industries report that AI is overhyped, ranging from 57% of tech leaders and going up to 69% among transportation industry leaders.

How often, or little, they're used by employees to increase their efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. For IBM, the only way to make AI a core part of the workflow across entire companies is to take a cue from a decades-old office staple: email. It's dangerous to think of AI as a magic tool, said Daniel Hernandez, VP of data and AI at IBM, speaking at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida last week. Instead, it should be seen as a strategy to empower staffers, helping them make more effective decisions through data while boosting employee experience. "Email gets no respect because it's boring," said Hernandez.

Now that Siri and Alexa have moved from guest to family member at home, the next frontier for artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants is the office. KPMG analyst Traci Gusher thinks that these assistants will soon move out of the basic "What's the weather going to be?" phase to take on more work-specific tasks. In the next stage of artificial intelligence (AI) development, humans will be able to use virtual assistants as notetakers. These assistants will need coaching along the way just like any junior employee. Gusher predicts the technology will reach the ideal state of "virtual keepers of wisdom" by 2030.

As for explainable AI, companies that buy AI-driven products look for explainability at a business level, said Arnab Chakraborty, Global managing director of applied intelligence for the U.S. West Coast region at Accenture. "A lot of our clients have to explain to stakeholders how models work," he said. So, the models need to be transparent. Accenture, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, has its own toolkit to help explain how AI systems work. The toolkit helps the company lay out different parameters that go into a model and how that model influences different APIs, among other things, Chakraborty said.