Insight announcements AI Adoption Is Accelerating — and Scaling Is a Challenge for IT Leaders
By Stan Lequin / 10 Jun 2025
By Stan Lequin / 10 Jun 2025
I get excited when I look at what our clients are doing and see companies like Cabot’s employing AI to drive innovation for their business. With guidance from Insight and Microsoft, their generative AI-powered chatbot, called the Cabot’s Project Assistant, provides automated customer support for DIY woodcare projects. Using advanced AI and cloud technologies, the chatbot dynamically answers questions, provides recommendations and solutions, and frees up the company’s help and advice teams to focus on more complex queries.
That’s progress. But change doesn’t always come easy as many organizations grapple with the complexities of AI adoption. No matter how great the hunger to use it is, AI only works if the right foundation is in place.
Today, we see clients push beyond first-generation bots, embedding generative AI into product development, operations, and knowledge workflows.
I’m also inspired by how clients like Manuka Health are scaling gen AI to streamline everyday operations. With support from Insight and Microsoft, they deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to help employees with drafting emails and documents faster to summarizing Teams meetings. What began as a test with IT and finance teams quickly expanded across departments once users saw how gen AI could reduce manual work. That kind of tangible impact is what makes AI adoption real
Research by Insight, in partnership with Foundry, an IDG company, illuminates how just about every company is testing AI to some degree. Yet finding success with it is another story.
According to the data in our survey, “The Path to Digital Transformation: Where IT Leaders Stand in 2024,” AI was top of mind with leadership. Our annual state-of-progress survey asked 400 senior IT decision-makers at companies of at least 1,500 employees across various industries about their planned digital transformation initiatives.
Nearly half of technology decision-makers (47%) say optimizing their data estate for AI is their organization’s top digital transformation priority. Furthermore, leveraging gen AI to drive innovation now ranks among their top three IT objectives just two years after its emergence.
Besides AI adoption, they also cited optimizing cloud operations (43%) and strengthening cybersecurity programs (37%) as their biggest priorities.
Recent research shows that 90% of enterprise organizations are actively using gen AI, with nearly half of those having progressed beyond the pilot stage and into production. Globally, 71% of organizations report regular use of gen AI in at least one business function, and 95% of U.S. companies say they are using gen AI despite common roadblocks like security, data quality, and governance.
A majority of organizations are now focused on measuring real value: 88% of global organizations are assessing the ROI of their AI initiatives, and 60% have appointed a Chief AI Officer to oversee long-term strategy and alignment. Meanwhile, 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI products, reflecting the technology’s foothold within the highest levels of enterprise.
The technology is seeing widespread use across IT, marketing, sales, product development, and customer service. Organizations are hiring for gen AI related roles and investing in internal training to build foundational skills and prompt literacy.
As gen AI I becomes more integrated into business processes, concerns over data security and responsible use are prompting organizations to develop comprehensive AI usage policies. And while optimism is high, 42% of C-suite leaders report that gen AI adoption has introduced internal divisions, highlighting the need for cohesive AI strategies.
Despite widespread usage, many organizations face internal challenges that limit generative AI’s full potential. Among them:
Additionally, the majority (61%) said they must invest further in AI talent and training. They ranked gaps in technology skills and knowledge as the top challenge inhibiting overall digital transformation (44%). Budget constraints followed (43%), while a lack of optimized infrastructure to support new technologies like gen AI was third (42%).
AI Centers of Excellence are now seen as essential for long-term success. While only 29% have built them, 62% are in the process, which we see as key to avoiding shadow projects and ballooning costs. Like many enterprises have learned through their cloud adoption experience, costs and shadow projects can easily get out of control if projects run independent of one another, with little governance in place to guide the management of what is acceptable.
So, while conversational and generative AI may be the big thing right now, it’s only going to get bigger as more organizations take their next steps to capitalize on the phenomenon.
Our survey spanned every facet of the digital journey, including how organizations are handling cloud/multicloud, as-a-service models, cybersecurity, platform engineering, and the use of technology to address Environmental, Social, and Governmental (ESG) issues.
Among the key findings:
Much of this is the less glamorous backbone work required to establish a strong AI program. After all, the quality of output you’ll get from something like a gen AI-powered chatbot that you want to use as front-line customer service is only as good as the data estate it draws from.
AI represents a paradigm shift in all-around work methodologies and business agility, so it’s not surprising that it is rising to the top of enterprise IT priorities. We see it with our clients daily: They’re unsure about how to unlock the potential of AI to drive new business value.
Organization leaders seek our help to upgrade their infrastructure, train employees on classical and generative AI concepts and prompts, identify use cases, and jumpstart AI projects by using our Insight Lens™ platform’s data ingestion capabilities.
Only when all the pieces of the puzzle are put in place do we see innovation from the Cabot’s of the world truly begin to take shape.
President, Insight Solutions
Stan leads Insight’s team of 5,000 deep technical experts — engineers, architects and software developers — who create and deliver integrated solutions dedicated to helping organizations accelerate their digital journey. His team solves clients' greatest pain points spanning the modern workplace, modern infrastructure, modern applications, data and artificial intelligence, the intelligent edge and cybersecurity. Insight Solutions cover consulting and managed services designed to help clients first visualize and strategize how they will innovate — including the organizational change management side of digital transformation — then fully execute and manage a fully digital business over time.