Cloudera, the California based data firm, has released a new study which reveals that although a majority of enterprises are adopting AI in some capacity, many are still lacking the necessary data infrastructure and employee skills to truly benefit from it.

Cloudera’s research, The State of Enterprise AI and Modern Data Architecture, is based on a survey of 600 IT leaders located in the U.S., EMEA, and APAC regions, and found that 88% of organisations are currently using AI.

Furthermore, AI tools are reportedly now being used most widely within IT (92%), customer service (52%), and marketing (45%) departments.

Despite the rapid adoption of AI, this new research reveals fears that many of the fundamental elements of a robust AI strategy are being neglected.

The top barriers to adopting AI were worries about the security and compliance risks that AI presents (74%), not having the proper training or talent to manage AI tools (38%), and AI tools being too expensive (26%). 

A key finding of the survey posits that all AI efforts are ultimately tied back to trustworthy data. While 94% of respondents said that they trust their data, 55% also said they would rather endure a painful dental procedure than try to access all of their company’s data. 

This frustration is driven by challenges including contradictory datasets (49%), an inability to govern data across platforms (36%), and too much data (35%).

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Commenting on the research, Cloudera’s chief strategy officer, Abhas Ricky, said: “For the majority of companies, the quality of their data is not great, it’s distributed across various infrastructures and not documented in an efficient manner, and we’re seeing the fallout from that presented in the challenges identified by the survey.

“Managing data where it resides is the most important thing when it comes to adopting AI. Instead of bringing the data to the models, enterprises are starting to realise the advantages of bringing AI models to their data.”

This latest research goes hand in hand with recent findings from the Open Data Institute, which reported that significant weaknesses in the UK’s tech infrastructure undermine the potential gains from AI advancements as well as any benefit for the economy.