A UBS survey of 125 IT executives reveals NVIDIA (NVDA, Financial), Microsoft (MSFT), and OpenAI continue to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The survey indicates a universal investment in AI, with all respondents exploring AI use cases. Notably, 61% of companies are already utilizing AI products and applications in at least one area, up from 52% six months ago.
However, UBS analyst Karl Keirstead notes that only 11% of institutions have implemented AI projects on a large scale 18-24 months after the rise of generative AI. The majority plan to operationalize projects by late 2025 or 2026, causing disappointment among investors expecting significant AI-driven growth by early 2025. The primary adoption barrier cited is the unclear return on investment.
Despite widespread AI investment, overall IT budgets are not expected to increase significantly by 2025, with anticipated growth declining from 5.6% last year to 4.4%. In AI hardware, NVIDIA maintains a dominant position, with 66% of respondents using its GPUs for inference, up from 50% in May. Amazon's (AMZN) AWS Trainium chips hold a 17% share, with AMD in third place.
For infrastructure, Microsoft Azure is the leading cloud service for AI workloads, used by 75% of respondents, an increase from 71%. Nonetheless, AI tools for programming have only slightly boosted productivity, with 40% reporting less than a 10% increase. Only 32% noted a 10% to 20% improvement, and just 2% saw productivity rise by over 30%.
Keirstead highlights that while these findings may be underwhelming compared to the hype, even a 5% improvement in programmer productivity is significant and could justify the costs involved.
