2024 AI Readiness Index - is Hong Kong ready yet?
The Cisco 2024 AI Readiness Index, which follows the 2023 inaugural Index, measures AI readiness of companies across six key pillars: Strategy, Infrastructure, Data, Governance, Talent, and Culture. Based on their readiness score, companies are categorized into four levels: Pacesetters (fully prepared), Chasers (moderately prepared), Followers (limited preparedness), and Laggards (unprepared).
Organizations across the Asia-Pacific, Japan, and Greater China (APJC) region have seen a decline across multiple areas of AI Readiness. This means that despite the focus and investment, business leaders do not feel they have made enough progress towards their AI ambitions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the dominant theme of the business world over the past couple of years. It’s increasingly in strategy updates, earnings statements, and in almost every stakeholder communication. At its current level of mass scale impact, AI may well overtake the cloud and even the internet in its significance as a technology disruptor.
However, as companies learn more about AI and how to adopt, deploy, and fully use its capabilities, they are beginning to realize they may not be as prepared as they thought.
Overall Picture - Global vs. APJC vs. Hong Kong
Strategy Readiness
Nothing can be deployed effectively in an organization without a clear strategy, and the same is true for AI. Our respondents agree, with 92% of organizations in Hong Kong stating they already have a highly defined AI strategy in place or are in the process of developing one, down from 95% last year.
Infrastructure Readiness
The readiness of Infrastructure to support AI initiatives has seen a significant decline, with 33% of Hong Kong organizations categorized as Pacesetters or Chasers this year, down from 50% a year ago. In fact, when asked how they would rate their own overall readiness of their IT infrastructure to accommodate AI technology adoption and scaling, close to half (47%) said they feel moderately ready at best.
Data Readiness
There has been plenty of discussion about the importance of data in the successful use of AI workloads. However, despite the growing knowledge about its criticality, the readiness of organizations to manage data effectively for AI initiatives has declined in the past year.
Governance Readiness
Against a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, effective AI governance has become even more crucial to the successful implementation of AI. However, it has also become more difficult as is evident from the dip in governance readiness. In this year’s Index, 25% of Hong Kong companies qualified as Pacesetters or Chasers, compared to 49% last year.
Talent Readiness
The race to adopt and deploy AI has triggered a widespread discussion on the lack of skilled talent in the field due in part to the pace at which the technology is evolving, with only 28% of organizations in Hong Kong claiming their talent is at a high state of readiness to fully leverage AI. More than a quarter (29%) of respondents say that their organizations are under resourced in terms of in-house talent necessary for successful AI deployment.
Culture Readiness
The growing adoption of AI is poised to bring about large and fundamental culture changes requiring stakeholder support and receptivity for success.
About the Research
Consistent with last year’s Index, the Cisco 2024 AI Readiness Index uses six pillars, each with an individual weightage, to benchmark AI readiness – Strategy (15%), Infrastructure (25%), Data (20%), Governance (15%), Talent (15%), and Culture (10%). Within these pillars, levels of readiness are assessed using a combined total of 49 indicators to determine a readiness score for each pillar, as well as an overall readiness score for the respondent’s
organization. The data was organized and categorized into a level of readiness, with respondents ranked in four groups – Pacesetters, Chasers, Followers, and Laggards.
These groups and their corresponding scores are pictured right in descending order.
