Generative AI tools have become an important part of process automation efforts globally, but many businesses are running into struggles, including dealing with ever-present hallucinations and a growing problem around employees bringing unauthorized versions of GenAI software into businesses, according to a new report from intelligent automation technology provider ABBYY.
In its State of Intelligent Automation: Generative AI Confessions, more than a quarter (27 percent) of U.S. organizations polled said GenAI tools were difficult to integrate into their business processes, 24 percent said staff misused the tools, 22 percent indicated they were using the technology without proper governance and one fifth cited problems with hallucinations (and a third said they ask their employees to manually check and correct GenAI tools’ results.
Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI Strategy at ABBYY, acknowledged the disillusionment executives are experiencing, but noted that better process intelligence and strategic planning could attenuate some of these issues.
“Businesses are spending money on GenAI tools that promise more than they can provide. In some cases, they don’t even need it,” Vermeir said “Before moving forward with leveraging GenAI tools or agentic AI, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”
Many US business leaders polled in the survey said they were able to address the challenges by layering in other technologies including AI agents (40 percent), process intelligence (36 percent), intelligent document processing (31 percent), and retrieval augmented generation (23 percent).