Nearly a third of enterprises are already prepping for AI

  • A recent Komprise survey asked 300 enterprises about their AI plans

  • 31% of companies are preparing for AI now

  • 40% of companies will use multiple approaches to mitigate AI risks like security

Artificial intelligence (AI), and preparing for it, has become a top priority for enterprises, according to fresh data management software company Komprise.

“In 2023, when asked to name their top data storage priority in the next 12 months, 31% said preparing for AI, with the next highest priority being cloud cost optimization (22%),” Krishna Subramanian, co-founder, president and COO of Komprise told Silverlinings in an email. She was detailing the results of a survey Komprise had done on AI. 

The survey, conducted by a third party, gathered inputs from 300 global enterprise storage IT and business decision makers at companies with more than 1,000 employees in the U.S. and the U.K. 

Silverlinings asked whether it's true that AI - and specifically model customization - is prohibitively expensive for companies other than large enterprises.

Subramanian conceded “that creating a custom AI model can be costly and time-consuming and requires specialized expertise." She added it would involve selecting a third-party, pre-trained model, such as GPT 4, BERT, T5 or RoBERTa, and training it with your own data to create a proprietary large language model (LLM).  

“The organization will need to procure an AI computing stack, which typically consists of high performance computing capacity (CPUs and GPUs), efficient flash storage and appropriate security systems to protect any sensitive IP data used in the LLM,” the COO said.

Naturally, this is where cloud hyperscalers have started to release platforms to help reduce the time and complexity of this effort, such as Azure Open  AI and Amazon Sagemaker.

“It’s not entirely clear yet where the market will go at this early stage and there are pros and cons of each approach; it’s safe to say though that for now, using public models will likely be more popular,” Subramanian noted. “Regardless of which approach an organization takes, there are a lot of data management and data governance, privacy issues they need to be aware of.”

Indeed, 40% of companies will pursue a multi-pronged approach to manage AI risk, encompassing storage, data management and security tools, the survey found.