Challenges Sparked by BYOS are Causing Shadow IT Risks
New survey results from ABBYY’s State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment and AI Wishlist report pinpoints the challenges business leaders are facing as they implement generative AI (GenAI) technology – leading to the need to use other AI tools to improve outputs.
GenAI is creating remarkable opportunities to reimagine how work gets done. However, GenAI’s potential is truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority.
The survey by Opinium Research, commissioned by ABBYY, shows that nearly a third (31%) of business leaders find training GenAI models harder than expected, while 28% say the tools were difficult to integrate into their business processes, and 26% did not have proper governance. Worryingly, a fifth (21%) say staff are misusing GenAI tools.
Many business leaders were able to address the challenges using other technologies, with more than a third (35%) turning to process intelligence, the same proportion using document AI, and a quarter introducing retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
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Adding these technologies were contributing factors to 98% of businesses being happy with their GenAI tools – seeing better consistency of outputs (50%), better integration into existing workflows (45%), more accurate and reliable results (43%), increased user trust (43%) and greater cost efficiency and savings (42%). However, investment in the next year appears to be less aggressive. Most respondents stated their budget will only increase by 16-20%, while only 11% expect to increase their AI budgets by 50% or more.
“Businesses spent money on GenAI tools that promised more than they can provide. In some cases, they didn’t even need it,” said Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI at ABBYY. “Before moving forward with GenAI tools for agentic automation, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”
Vermeir continued, “We’ve helped customers like a global fast-food chain improve the extraction of data from thousands of lease agreements by 82% by using document AI to improve GenAI outputs. When training models prove more difficult than expected, pre-trained, purpose-built AI turns out to be the right solution.”
The survey also revealed that a fifth of businesses are experiencing “Shadow AI”, with 20% of business leaders saying that GenAI is only being used by employees for their own personal productivity, rather than as part of management-driven initiatives. Four-in-ten (41%) admit that a driving factor for introducing GenAI was that employees were already using it on a Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) basis for personal productivity.
Almost half (49%) say staff use it to “make them look smarter and more professional,” while 56% say it helps reduce workload and increases productivity. Generally, staff are optimistic about GenAI, with 89% of leaders saying they enjoy positive results.
Ulf Persson, CEO at ABBYY, commented, “GenAI is creating remarkable opportunities to reimagine how work gets done, which is rightfully generating a great deal of excitement. However, shadow AI, when individuals use commonly available tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Perplexity without oversight at work, potentially raises serious data privacy and compliance concerns. The corporate benefits of GenAI’s potential are truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority.”
