Singapore – As companies continue to adopt artificial intelligence, a recent report by search analytics company Elastic revealed that most Singaporean businesses are considering AI-powered search engines vital for enhancing workplace productivity.
Data from the findings indicated that nearly half of the respondents surveyed believe that tools powered by AI can help employees save an average of two days per week, with the majority of them seeing the importance of conversational search systems across the workplace.
Around 86% of decision-makers in the city-state also intend to increase their investments in generative AI this year and in the future. A significant 81%, on the other hand, anticipates that these allocated budgets will continue to rise over the next three years.
Over half further stated the assistance that generative AI could offer for companies for better resource utilisation, with it helping them in increasing operational efficiency and productivity as well as improving customer experiences.
Meanwhile, nearly all respondents expressed confidence in the transformative role of conversational AI search engines in their businesses. According to them, the said engines, powered by large language models are able to answer users’ questions and follow-up queries by gathering and summarising data from the internet.
Talking about the report, Ravi Rajendran, area vice president of ASEAN at Elastic, said, “Businesses that adopt search powered GenAI quickest, anchored by security and grounded by business context, quickly and securely will become the market leaders for uncovering insights needed to build resilient modern businesses, accelerate innovation, and pioneer new bespoke user experiences.”
While Singaporean firms were among the early adopters of AI compared to their global counterparts, the said adoption has been slow due to various challenges including regulatory roadblocks, skills gaps, and uncertainties about the reliability of AI-generated information.
In addition, the majority also reported struggling with AI-powered data searches, with concerns about the difficulty of effectively utilising search results, the inability to cover multiple sources of information, and the perception that responses were not provided quickly enough.
