Supply chain, procurement, finance business leaders set to make investments in AI

A further 25% also plan to make a minor investment in AI to determine its potential ROI over the next two years.

The research commissioned by Ivalua revealed that finance, supply chain and procurement business leaders believe that one of the biggest challenges to adopting AI is the poor quality of enterprise data. Almost two-thirds of respondents (59%) said that poor data quality will make it impossible for AI to make accurate and informed decisions, undermining their ability to get value from any AI investment.

Improving the caliber of data is no easy task, with respondents detailing that their inability to access data (44%), a lack of normalization between data sets (43%) and inaccurate data (41%) as their biggest challenges to improving overall quality. In addition, 36% cited that information overload and lack of internal skills makes it difficult to make sense of data.

In addition to data challenges, 44% of respondents said they do not have the support of C-level executives regarding AI innovation. They also claim that they aren’t currently able to get full value from AI due to the immaturity of applications, with 62% citing this as a problem, suggesting AI vendor marketing is far more advanced than capabilities. There is also uncertainty regarding how to apply AI to certain use cases (47%).

In terms of the practical uses of AI, the study details that respondents believe it can have the most impact in alerting the enterprise and suppliers to supply chain disruption (44%), recognizing and flagging supplier compliance issues (39%), and quickly identifying instances of fraud (37%).

Two of the biggest areas flagged by respondents as having the greatest potential for automation is invoice processing (51%) and approval of proposed purchases (35%).

The study was conducted by Forrester Consulting and is based on a survey of over 400 finance, procurement and supply chains leaders in US, UK, France and Germany.