SMBs are ramping up AI investment at scale

Substantial increases in AI funding during the next five years are on the cards for SMBs.

This is according to new research commissioned by Schneider Electric and conducted by Tech Research Asia.

‘The essential guide to understanding AI for SMB and Mid Market leaders in Australia and New Zealand’ research explored AI’s growing landscape and its potential to drive significant growth and innovation for SMBs. 

More than 500 SMBs across A/NZ took part in the survey, uncovering that AI adoption was booming within this market segment with almost half indicating they’ll be significantly increasing their AI investment. 

Businesses were keen to leverage AI to drive growth, improve customer experience, and manage costs with two-thirds of respondents increasing their IT budgets this year.

Tech Research Asia principal analyst Michael Barnes noted the past eight months has seen a significant shift towards growth as a business priority – growth in existing and new markets. 

“For the past several years, the focus was very much on costs and risk management as a number one business priority that has shifted,” Barnes said. 

Forty-three per cent of respondents said dealing with embedded AI would be their top focus this year.

The research also took a lens on the potential use cases for AI across industries with crucial considerations for AI investments covering infrastructure, data management, security, personnel, processes, goal setting, and the role of partners’ services – from edge computing to core solutions such as colocation, private data centres, or cloud services. 

Security and data presented the biggest hurdles to AI adoption for more than 42 per cent of respondents.

Schneider Electric vice president of Secure Power, Joe Craparotta, highlighted half of the respondents indicated that AI implementation will be across every facet of their operation, while the other half will take a project-by-project approach. 

This will also see hybrid IT architecture marked as the standard approach particularly as workloads are scattered across edge computing, cloud and on-premises environments. A majority of SMBs agreed they must include edge environments with AI solutions.

“Hybrid architecture is here to stay,” he said. “About 70 to 80 per cent of workloads are sitting on the cloud while there’s a whole raft of workloads that are sitting at the edge.”

This further led towards the importance of data centre AI infrastructure being sustainable, secure and safe, Craparotta said. 

“AI implementation, data center resilience implementation, and sustainability are completely interlocked,” he said. 

On top of the increase in spending budget, some of the IT management priorities included modernisation of applications; security, risk management and governance compliance; and improving sustainability. 

“That’s the first time it’s made it into the top three in terms of IT management priorities, which is great to see. It needs to be there. AI clearly has a pretty massive role to play in driving improvements in that area,” Barnes said. 

“The fact that modernisation is number one, indicates to us, SMBs are getting their internal house in order.”