Only 3 % of Swiss companies generate customer benefits with AI
According to a survey by the open source service provider Red Hat, digital sovereignty is a top priority in the IT strategy of 71 % of respondents in Switzerland. For 98 %, an open source strategy is of crucial importance, particularly with regard to cost optimization, virtualization, security and AI. However, the customer benefits of AI have so far fallen by the wayside.
Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the results of a new survey. The survey polled 909 IT managers and directors (including infrastructure and cloud infrastructure managers) and AI engineers (including software engineers in AI/ML, NLP and LLM engineers and data scientists) from companies with more than 500 employees in the EMEA region (in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom). When asked about their company's IT strategy for the next 18 months, 79 % of respondents in Switzerland stated that encryption is a top priority in the age of quantum computing, followed by virtualization (76 %) and hybrid or multi-cloud (75 %). 75 % also place a high priority on AI: The results show that Swiss companies expect their investments in AI to increase by an average of 30 % by 2026. However, 97 % of the companies surveyed state that they are not yet deriving any customer benefits from their AI investments.
AI as a continuous process
The highest priority for respondents when it comes to AI (75 %) is the operationalization of AI (82 %). Ensuring transparency and openness in the AI strategy (81 %) and AI agents (80 %) are also at the top of the priority list.
Attracting and retaining talent remains a challenge. In Switzerland, respondents identify three critical skills gaps at the top of the list: cloud computing skills (78 %) top the list, while security skills (77 %) and strategic/business skills (77 %) are almost equally cited as the most pressing needs.
Respondents also see obstacles to the introduction of AI, in particular the high costs of implementation and maintenance (37 %), insufficient infrastructure or resources (35 %) or the lack of transparency in AI models (35 %). In addition, 97 % of respondents state that they are confronted with shadow AI, i.e. the unauthorized use of AI tools by employees.
Trust reduced by complexity - open source as the key
Confidence in Switzerland's potential on the global AI stage is high: 95 % of respondents agree that the country is a leader in AI or has the potential to become one within the next three years. Other European countries, such as Spain with 99 % or Sweden and the Netherlands with 98 %, also recorded high values here. Respondents cite the lack of public funding (52 %), the insufficient commitment of the private sector (48 %) and the lack of young talent (43 %) as the main reasons hindering Switzerland's rise to become a leading AI nation. In order to overcome these challenges and achieve their goals in the field of AI, Swiss companies are relying on open source in all areas of their IT strategy. The respondents almost unanimously (98 %) consider open source software to be important for companies when it comes to cost optimization, virtualization, security and AI.
According to the Red Hat survey, the cloud is and remains one of the three most important topics on the IT agenda in Switzerland. As an additional workload, AI increases complexity and must be reconciled with evolving cloud strategies. Barriers to cloud adoption remain: respondents cite concerns about internal silos (73 %), pauses in infrastructure investment decisions due to market uncertainty (67 %) and sovereignty (65 %). When looking at the cloud sovereignty strategy for the next 18 months, respondents from Switzerland focus on flexibility and freedom of choice for IT providers (87 %), operational control and autonomy (83 %) and securing the software supply chain (81 %).
Source: Red Hat
