New findings from ABBYY’s ‘State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment’ survey reveals challenges in implementing Generative AI (GenAI) for senior managers and above in medium and large businesses – prompting the use of other AI to improve outputs.
The survey by Opinium Research, commissioned by ABBYY reflects that nearly a third (32%) of UK leaders said their staff did not have the skills to deploy GenAI. Meanwhile, 30% say training GenAI models was harder than expected, and a quarter (25%) said it was difficult to integrate into their business processes. Worryingly, a fifth (20%) said staff misuse the tools.
To address these challenges UK leaders are introducing other technologies, with 45% using AI agents, 42% turning to process intelligence, 38% using Document AI, and a quarter (25%) introducing retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to improve outputs.
Adding these technologies were contributing factors to 99% of UK respondents ultimately being happy with their GenAI tools – with those who used the technology seeing better consistency of outputs (56%), greater cost efficiency and savings (50%), and more accurate results (48%).
“Businesses are spending money on GenAI tools that promise more than they can provide. In some cases they don’t even need it,” said Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI, ABBYY. “Before moving forward with leveraging GenAI tools for agentic AI, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.
“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 businesses are experiencing ‘Shadow AI’, with four in 10 (39%) UK respondents admitting that a driving factor for implementation was employees already using it on a Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) basis.
Employees are generally optimistic about GenAI, with leaders reporting that 91% hold a positive view of the technology. More than half (54%) say staff use it to “make them look smarter and more professional”, while 61% report that it helps reduce workload and supports creativity.
Given a wish list of improvements to GenAI, 38% of UK workers wanted GenAI to save time through manually processing information from documents – higher than the US at 20%, Australia at 29% and Germany at 24%.
“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 is truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority,” said Ulf Persson, CEO of ABBYY.
In terms of investment, A quarter (24%) of UK respondents said they have spent more than £1m on AI in the last year, with the average spend in the UK being £840.4K. As for next year, the average budget is anticipated to increase 22%, while 9% of respondents will raise budgets by over 50%.
