How companies across the market are deploying AI tools

Welcome back to the exchange. AI is a hit with Wall Street, obviously, as all of those stocks have been driving the recent market gains. But what happens when you head out there to the typical office complex? Steve Kovac joins us now with the results of our latest Tech Executive Council survey and what it reveals about AI adoption in the workplace. Steve Yeah, Kelly. Well, we're, you know, 18 months or so into the AI boom, but the question is now are people actually using it? And that's an important question for businesses which are being targeted to buy AI tools and cloud capacity by companies like Salesforce and Microsoft, among so many others. So we asked a small group of people from our Tech Executive Council to get an idea. It's made-up of CTO, CIO's and other tech leaders who make those tech purchasing decisions at their companies. And here's what they told us. The majority, 60%, said their employees are using company approved AI tools. That's up from 50% for the same. A year ago. But it's not just approved AI tools. 20% of our respondents said their employees are using unapproved AI tools to do their work. That's a big no no. And 12%, it's a mix of approved and unapproved tools. Basically everyone says they're using AI. It's just the mix match of all these things. And it also matches what I've heard from tech executives outside of the survey. In my conversations, they've told me they're interested in using AI tools, but some, like Microsoft's Copilot, are just too expensive to deploy across an entire company, and the productivity benefits are still unclear. Still, these numbers should tell you we're at the beginning of a real new wave of technology. This is not a bunch of promises like we saw with the blockchain or the metaverse. People are actually using these tools. Kelly, is there a risk they are going to be embarrassed down the road somehow that that let's say if you're inputting something into AI you wouldn't want your boss to know about, is it ever going to be leaked or get out there? Yeah. And that's the thing when you talk when that segment of the survey of people using unapproved tools, that is the real problem. Because let's just say, for example, Kelly, you use your personal ChatGPT account to help you do some writing at work. Well, anything proprietary from CNBC or NBC that you upload to ChatGPT, they can use that to train their models. But there are enterprise versions of these apps, including at Open AI and Microsoft and so many other companies that keeps your data, or at least they say keeps it kind of containerized and safe. Some are even doing it so you only can store your data physically at the location of your office. So there are workarounds for that. But you're totally right. This is the kind of case where any data you upload, you got to be careful if you're using an enterprise version or the consumer version, Kelly. And I'm sure that's a big selling point as they try to get more enterprise adoption of various AI tools. Steve, thank you. Steve Kovac.