Advantages of AI on different continents

A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit looked at a service sector in terms of AI that concerns us all and that manages a vital product: The financial industry. The study summarizes the main tangible benefits and the main obstacles to the use of AI, broken down by region. This breakdown allows cultural and geographical differences to be compared and interpreted.

The main benefits identified from using AI are, in descending order of importance, the reduction of operating costs (37% of respondents agree), increased use of predictive analytics (34%), increased employee capacity to handle the workload (33%), improved personalized customer service and satisfaction (32%) and reduced employee workload (31%). However, severe regional differences are therefore visible. For example, 61% of the respondents in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region stated that AI supports more than half of the activities; in Europe, this was only 41%. This gap of 20% means that European countries cannot exploit many of the advantages of an AI. It is therefore logical that only 32% of European companies report that they see this trend in reducing operating costs, compared to 44% in the APAC region. Also, the increased employee capacity is less noticeable in Europe (30%) than in North America (39%).

The question now arises why Europe cannot/does not want to take advantage of many of the benefits of AI and what are the main obstacles in international comparison. The most substantial barriers to the introduction of AI, as mentioned by respondents, are the cost of technology (39%), the insufficient infrastructure for AI (29%), the inadequate data quality for testing and verification of an AI (28%), the lack of sufficiently qualified staff (27%) and the lack of management’s knowledge about AI (23%).
The surprising fact about the results is that the European representatives in the study only see the greatest need for action in the area of insufficiently qualified employees (29%) compared to APAC (28%) and North America (20%). For the other obstacles, Europe is usually less critical and sees less need for action in an international comparison.

Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the companies in the different regions emanate from a different „level“ of AI and more complex tasks and evaluations are planned in North America and Asia than in Europe or whether our possibilities are better than it is suggested. It is certainly undisputed that we have to catch up in the international competition, but we also have to try to get the best out of the resources we have, and this is not yet happening.

Here MEJOIN tries to identify the available resources and give them to the companies to minimize the differences and decide the international comparison per Europe.