Gartner Predicts Concerns For Enterprises Using Cloud-based Generative AI

Analyst house Gartner has offered some market insights for cloud-using enterprises utilising generative AI in the years ahead.

Gartner in its report entitled “Predicts 2024: Unravelling Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Landscape,” predicted that by 2027, 70 percent of enterprises adopting generative AI (GenAI) will cite sustainability and digital sovereignty as the top criteria for selecting between different public cloud GenAI services.

It comes after Gartner last October had warned enterprises to focus on worker augmentation to improve productivity and quality of work, rather than role automation from AI.

Data locations

Gartner has said that cloud technology will continue to be best delivery option for generative AI applications at scale, but there will be some concerns that will need to be considered.

“Because of its scale and shared services model, cloud technology is best-suited for the delivery of GenAI-enabled applications at scale and the development of general-purpose foundation models,” said Sid Nag, VP Analyst at Gartner.

“However, certain aspects must be addressed, including digital sovereignty, or the ability to control where data is stored and where operations are executed, and sustainability issues so that organisations can operationalise GenAI,” said Nag.

Gartner said that the advancement of foundation models (FMs) and large language models (LLMs), which are the core of GenAI capabilities, are driving rapid and continual evolution of GenAI capabilities and use cases.

But it noted that the implementation of GenAI in the enterprise poses significant regulatory challenges, including regulations on the data contained within LLMs, as well applications that utilise these FMs and LLMs.

“Specialty cloud providers will become an important consideration for many enterprise cloud architectures as organisations extend their cloud operations to cover diverse locations and use cases,” said Gartner’s Nag.

“Digital sovereignty will drive the need to include cloud providers that can meet the evolving and unique requirements of sovereign operations no matter the region they operate in,” he added.

Sustainability issue

The Gartner report also highlighted sustainability’s role in public cloud decisions in the years ahead.

The analyst group said that organisations deploying GenAI services will look to the public cloud, given the scale of the required infrastructure, but they will also require cloud providers to address non-technical issues related to sustainability.

It cited the pressure from investors, customers, regulators and governments about sustainability, which is forcing organisations to manage and optimise their IT carbon emissions to achieve their environmental sustainability goals.

Gartner predicted that new processes, capabilities and tools will be introduced, oriented to the monitoring and management of energy consumption and carbon emissions for GenAI workloads deployed on cloud.

“Cloud computing plays a pivotal role today in supporting sustainability and GenAI business applications by providing scalable infrastructure, enabling eco-friendly practices and allowing cost-effective resource management,” Nag concluded.

“Cloud is the platform that most IT leaders rely upon to support their sustainability journey when it comes to overall GenAI implementation. “