60% of enterprise chief information officers (CIOs) report plans to increase spending on artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing workloads with Microsoft, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) Survey.
- BI’s survey affirmed Nvidia’s GPU leadership, while Intel’s score improved amongst preferred CPU for AI servers
- The results indicate that 70% of corporations surveyed are now using OpenAI, up from 41% in December
- Cybersecurity dominated IT spending with 40% of CIO respondents ranking it as a number one priority, nearly double vs. December 2023
Chief information officers (CIOs)’s are shifting their spending from servers, storage, and networking, to Large Language Model (LLM) deployment. The survey shows a clear preference for Microsoft in cloud deployment.
The inference stage of AI workloads refers to the process that a trained machine learning model uses to draw conclusions from new data.
According to the survey results, AI investments were a high priority for CIOs, ranking higher in planned spending allocation versus prior surveys. The growing AI emphasis suggests rising importance among CIOs to leverage AI to remain competitive. Investments in AI models, GPUs and cloud all ranked high in laying the foundation for future AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s GPU leadership was on display, with Intel’s CPU preference improving for AI servers.
Now that enterprises have spent significant time in the research and development phase with their AI models, many of them are progressing from the proof-of-concept stage to deployment of their AI copilots. This has led to Microsoft gaining 14 percentage points since the December survey in hyperscale cloud value for data analysis, Google gaining 5 points and Amazon falling 17 points. Spending on AI models and workloads is likely to continue to increase over the next 12 months as more enterprises progress into larger-scale deployments.
Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence and the lead author of the report, said in a statement: “We’re witnessing a significant shift in CIO preferences as enterprise AIs move towards the deployment of their copilots, with 66% of respondents saying they are in the process of deployment compared to December’s 32%. This, coupled with newfound visibility in the need for robust cybersecurity spending in the wake of the CrowdStrike disruption, have significantly shifted the spending needs of CIOs even in the last six months.”
Cybersecurity dominated IT spending in July with 40% of CIO respondents, nearly double the amount that responded in December 2023, citing it as their highest priority. The survey was conducted during the same time period as the CrowdStrike outage, when cybersecurity spending became increasingly non-discretionary due to the high risk of business disruption seen by the interruption. Servers, storage, and networking all were also deprioritized for CIOs since the last survey.