Most firms are using AI despite irrelevancy claims - report

Most businesses use AI in daily operations - despite 80 per cent believing it to be irrelevant, a new report claims.

The AI In Practice report was published by Birmingham-based law firm HCR Law and CyNam, the regional cybercluster which connects cyber, tech and innovation organisations across Gloucestershire and beyond.

The research also revealed that only 17 per cent of adults can explain what AI is, and just 11 per cent of workers receive adequate training to use it safely and effectively.

The report is based on a year’s worth of research across the UK undertaken by HCR Law and CyNam, including roundtables, surveys and one-to-one discussions with professionals in sectors such as healthcare, financial services, agriculture, education and others.

While those participating in the research were not primarily worried about superintelligent machines, some in the healthcare sector expressed their concern about AI giving confident but wrong outputs in clinical decision-making (often referred to as AI hallucination).

Others highlighted their concerns about such issues as AI recruitment tools quietly discriminating against underrepresented applicants or information given by open-source models (such as the free version of ChatGPT and others), with their safety controls removed.

The potential loss of skills, which could be replaced by AI, was also a major worry.

Despite all these concerns, everyone wants to know more about how AI could make a genuine difference to their business – and give them a competitive edge.

Frank Jennings (pictured), partner in the Technology and Innovation team at HCR Law, who chaired the four roundtables said: “AI isn’t coming – it’s already here, embedded in the software, analytics and platforms businesses use every day.

“The problem is that many organisations don’t recognise or endorse it, which means they can’t govern it.”

HCR Law and CyNam’s research reveals AI adoption is patchy, clustered in specific functions and driven by enthusiastic individuals rather than coherent organisational strategy.

It also uncovers how AI is being used in different areas of business, the level of governance and the specific barriers each sector had to overcome.

In the financial service sector, particularly in fraud detection, AI-driven systems have significantly reduced false positives, allowing human investigators to focus on genuinely suspicious activity.

In the lending sector, AI is enabling institutions to analyse a broader range of data, resulting in faster and more accurate decisions.

In education, the research found that AI is often being adopted faster – and less predictably than institutional frameworks can currently accommodate.

Students are often more proficient with AI tools than their teachers, which creates a particular challenge - schools are expected to integrate AI into the curriculum at the same time as managing the risk that students will use it to complete assessed work rather than learn.

One of the sectors where AI applications are already delivering measurable value is agriculture.

Wearable sensors using machine learning monitor a cow’s temperature, movement, eating habits and rumination patterns, which can signal illness hours or days before visible symptoms appear.

Robotic milking is used by many dairy farmers, and overhead cameras using AI can provide consistent monitoring of livestock that manual observation can’t match at scale.

 AI is creating a skills divide as well as a jobs divide, the research revealed. This matters because of its direct economic impact. Entry-level roles are where people develop the practical knowledge, judgement and competence that can’t be acquired solely through formal training.

The full report, published by HCR Law and CyNam, is available to download.