IBM has officially published results from its latest study, which claims that more and more companies are now investing in the power of AI to optimize their ROI.
Going by the available details, this study took into account the opinion of over 2,400 IT decision makers (ITDMs). More on the same would reveal how it was conducted by Morning Consult and developed in collaboration with Lopez Research.
As for the results, they revealed that 85% of respondents are making progress in executing their 2024 AI strategy, with nearly half (47%) already seeing positive ROI from their AI investments. Furthermore, the provided data reinforces that open-source tools’ use for AI solutions could be an indicator for greater financial viability. We get to say so because an estimated 51% of surveyed companies, which are banking upon open-source AI tools, reported seeing positive ROI, as compared to just 41% of those not using open source.
Moving on, nearly two-thirds (62%) of all respondents said they will increase their AI investments in 2025. To expand upon that a little bit, nearly two-fifths (39%) of respondents plan to up their spending by 25-50%. Against that number, no more than 5% of respondents plan to decrease their AI spending, and none by more than 50%.
“As organizations begin to implement AI at scale, many are placing greater stock in success metrics such as productivity gains, in part because traditional hard dollar ROI benefits have yet to show up on the balance sheets,” said Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research. “Yet, companies continue to rapidly advance their AI strategies, with no sign of slowing down. Companies now recognize the value of defining specific use cases and optimizing AI projects. They are leveraging hybrid cloud strategies and open source to drive AI innovation and deliver financial returns.”
Next up, we must dig into how most companies are actually focusing on specific areas for allocating their AI investments, This includes a particular focus on IT operations (the top focus area for 63% percent of respondents), as well as data quality management (46%), and product/services innovation (41%). Beyond that, when asked what strategic changes will be made in 2025, a larger chunk of surveyed ITDMs deemed using managed cloud services (51%), hiring specialized talent (48%) and utilizing open source (48%) among the most common ways they plan to optimize their AI investments.
We referred to the growing popularity of open source AI, but what we haven’t mentioned yet is how 6-in-10 ITDMs reported to use open-source ecosystems as an AI tool source, and more AI solutions are expected to be based on open source in the coming year (41% in 2025 vs. 37% in 2024). Alongside that, more than 80% of respondents report that at least a quarter of their company’s AI solutions or platforms are already based on open source.
Another detail worth a mention here is rooted in how 85% of surveyed ITDMs report making progress in executing their AI strategy, while only 9% report no progress. Within this contingent, 58% of respondents say their company typically moves from AI pilot to full production in less than a year.
On top of that, 31% of surveyed companies were found to reveal that their AI investments are driven more by innovation, compared to 28% that are more ROI driven. Beyond that, 41% indicate that their organization is equally innovation and ROI-driven.
Among other things, we ought to mention that faster software development (25%), more rapid innovation (23%), and productivity time savings (22%) ranked as the three most important metrics surveyed ITDMs use to calculate ROI from AI investments, whereas hard dollar/quantifiable savings was a distant fourth at 15%.
We must also touch upon the fact that nearly half (47%) of surveyed companies say they are achieving positive ROI from their AI projects; 33% say they are breaking even and just 14% say they are recording negative ROI. If we dig deeper into companies that are not yet achieving positive ROI, less than half (44%) expect to begin seeing dollar savings within the next 1 to 2 years; 92% believe they will turn a positive ROI within 3 years.
