• Salesforce has released its State of IT report, looking at key trends within the industry across 28 countries.
• For South Africa, one of the big insights came as regards IT leaders’ opinion on generative AI.
• The vast majority of leaders believe it will revolutionise the IT industry.

Generative AI continues to be a significant topic of discussion across a myriad industries. The same holds true for the IT industry, especially here in South Africa, as a recent report published by Salesforce shows how generative AI is top of mind for the vast majority of IT leaders.

The report, which is the company’s third State of IT report, surveyed more than 4 325 IT leaders across 29 different countries, highlighting trends that are continuing to take shape, such as application development, the IT services demand and supply gap, and the impact of automation and AI.

Regarding the latter, South Africans are particularly interested, as Salesforce notes that 87 percent of local IT leaders believe generative AI will soon have a prominent role in their organisations. Added to this is that 83 percent already say the role of AI in their organisations is well-defined.

As Salesforce frames it, “Generative AI is set to revolutionise IT.”

That said, there is still some hesitation, as 74 percent of those surveyed locally have noted concern about the ethics of generative AI.

Similar concerns have been raised regarding AI in other fields, as the Authors Guild recently penned an open letter to companies developing AI technologies to fairly compensate them for training their tools and platforms.

AI firms themselves have also called for greater oversight and stricter regulation to curb the speed at which generative AI platforms are advancing, but little seems to be happening to curtail rollouts and implementations.

Perhaps then, local IT leaders will continue to have a cautious approach while still acknowledging the fact that generative AI integration within their organisations could lead to distinct advantages.

Salesforce, for example, debuted its suite of tools for business too, all of which are imbued with ChatGPT-esque functionality to assist organisations when it comes to CRM, website building, and extracting value from data.

“For Africa, we’re always looking at things that can save us costs. And we’re always looking into how to increase productivity. I think AI like Einstein unlocks a lot of value for companies, which is really critical in the African context,” noted Salesforce solutions engineer, Linda Saunders, when we spoke to her earlier this year.

“Einstein allows African countries to surpass the gap that they have in terms of digitisation. These technologies can fill the skills gap so that African companies can compete at the world level,” she added.

To find out more trends shaping IT both in SA and in other parts of the world, you can sign up for and download the latest Salesforce report here.