2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey: PwC
1. Prioritize AI-powered cloud architectures to redefine strategy
As AI becomes ingrained in how companies do business, next-generation cloud architectures that take advantage of the latest AI capabilities are fueling modern business strategies. While most companies still think about AI as part of their technology strategy — or worse, spinning up disconnected AI initiatives across the business — Top Performers are going all-in, making it an integrated part of the business plan across functions. Two-thirds of Top Performers (67%) tell us they have a formalized strategy, including an approach to identifying, implementing and tracking the use of AI across the organization. Just 37% of other companies say the same.
While responsibility for technology architecture and cloud engineering typically falls to a company’s CIO and other tech leaders, the choices made establish a foundation that make AI-centric transformation and new business models possible — and that’s a CEO-level consideration. It’s crucial for CIOs to partner with their CEOs, perhaps in new ways, to make the right technology choices and inspire the rest of their organizations. Together, you can set expectations and continually demonstrate how various AI initiatives are fundamental to business strategy and growth.
Given AI’s applicability and impact to all areas of the business, every C-suite executive has an important role to play. In the near term, we expect more companies to appoint chief AI officers to help establish that vision and drive strategy together with senior leadership from across the business. We’re seeing this strategic teaming happen in many areas. In the front office, for instance, CIOs team with CMOs to focus on hyper-personalization and loyalty ecosystems. At the same time, we see chief revenue officers looking at how their sales teams leverage AI to accelerate deal cycles, curate proposals and presentations, and accelerate general time to market for products.
In the middle office, CIOs work with COOs and their teams — including procurement, customer service, risk and sustainability leads — using AI to modernize and streamline their processes, which in turn helps the front office better meet customers where they are. It also provides internal teams with the ability to run the business at a higher velocity with less tech debt and cumbersome systems. In the back office, CIOs and their IT teams can drive new ways of working and reinvent backend systems to accelerate delivery and drive business strategy.
Far and away, the biggest behavioral difference between Top Performers and other companies in our survey is that 72% of the former say they’ve achieved “all-in cloud adoption” when it comes to modernizing data, compared to just 33% of other companies. By moving their data to cloud and making it more easily ingestible by large language models (LLMs), Top Performers are more readily able to unlock new value from their data as they integrate new AI capabilities.
Top Performers are also more mature than other companies when it comes to other cloud engineering disciplines — by a factor of more than 2X. For example, they’re all-in on cloud — meaning they’ve broadly adopted cloud — for security (70% versus 37%), AI (60% versus 27%), migration (59% versus 25%), app modernization (57% versus 27%), native app development (57% versus 24%) and industry-specific solutions (54% versus 25%), among other areas.
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