UBS Group AG survey: AI applications continue to expand, NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) maintain leading positions.

A survey conducted by UBS Group AG of 125 institutional IT executives shows that NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US), and OpenAI continue to dominate the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The survey reveals that all enterprises are investing in artificial intelligence. 100% of respondents indicated that they are at least in the research and discovery phase of AI. Additionally, 61% of companies are already using AI products and applications in at least one business area, a higher percentage than the 52% six months ago. UBS Group AG analyst Karl Keirstead stated, "The bad news is that only 11% of institutions plan to deploy AI projects at scale in the next 18-24 months after the rise of generative artificial intelligence, with the remaining 89% mostly planning to deploy projects in the second half of 2025 or 2026. This continued delay in progress is disappointing for investors expecting a noticeable boost from AI by the first half of 2025. The most commonly cited barriers to adoption currently are 'unclear return on investment'." Although all surveyed companies have invested in AI to some extent, overall IT budgets for 2025 are not expected to increase significantly. Last year, executives expected a 5.6% increase in IT budgets. By 2025, this increase has decreased to 4.4%. In terms of AI hardware, NVIDIA Corporation continues to dominate, with 66% of respondents using NVIDIA Corporation GPUs for inference. Last May, only 50% of respondents preferred using NVIDIA Corporation products for inference. Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) AWS's Trainium chip ranks second with a 17% share, followed by AMD (AMD.US) in third place. In terms of infrastructure, Microsoft Corporation Azure is the largest provider of cloud services for AI workloads. Three-quarters of respondents stated that they use Azure to run generative AI applications, higher than the 71% in the previous survey. However, many companies using AI tools to aid in programming only saw a slight increase in productivity. 40% of respondents stated that the productivity of developers increased by less than 10% after using new automatic programming tools. However, 32% of respondents claimed that the productivity of developers increased by 10% to 20%. Keirstead noted, "These responses are expected but not particularly encouraging in our view. While Microsoft Corporation claims that programmers using GitHub Copilot have seen a productivity increase of over 50%, only 2% of respondents claimed a productivity increase of over 30% in this survey. The average 14% increase in productivity is actually lower than the 16% in previous surveys." He added, "While these responses may be disappointing compared to the hype, we note that even a 5% increase in productivity for programmers is significant and might well validate the price."