Enterprises are ploughing on with AI adoption despite facing a skills crisis, says a new survey by O’Reilly, the e-learning provider.

According to the survey, 23% of respondents feel that the lack of skilled people is hampering AI adoption. In O’Reilly’s 2018 AI survey, 20% of respondents said the lack of skilled people slowed adoption.

But despite the skills gap, 81% of respondents work for organisations that already use AI. Furthermore, more than 60% of organisations are planning to spend at least 5% of their IT budget on AI over the next 12 month; 19% are planning to spend at least 20% on their IT budget on AI.

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“AI maturity and usage in the enterprise has grown exponentially over the past year, and there are no signs of that slowing down,” said Ben Lorica, O’Reilly chief data scientist and AI Conference chair. “Mature organisations with plans to spend on AI tools that hire talent to identify use cases that fit those AI solutions will succeed, but for those less-mature companies with a lack of investment in AI, we expect the gap between leaders and laggards will only widen.”

“Lack of data” and “lack of skilled people” remain key factors that slow down enterprise AI adoption, along with “company culture” (23%) and “difficulties identifying use cases” (17%).

More than half of all respondents signalled that their organisations are in need of machine learning experts and data scientists.

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