# 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey: PwC

Building the AI-powered business: 4 ways cloud leaders redefine success

Are we still in an AI hype cycle? It depends on who you ask. But regardless of whether they’re an AI skeptic, champion or realist, they’d likely agree that AI has already fundamentally changed business. It has reset expectations, enabled new cloud architectures and opened up a world of possibilities unimaginable just a few short years ago. As a maturing technology, we’ve moved from a focus on experimentation and singular AI use cases to an imperative to think bigger and bolder about its role in business reinvention. Organizations will soon be AI-first and cloud-powered — adopting these technologies not as tools, but as fundamental components at every level of the business, driving innovation, efficiency and competitiveness across the business landscape.

The question business leaders should be asking: _What does success look like in an AI-led, cloud-powered economy that redefines how industries operate, compete and thrive?_ As leading companies are already proving, the decisions you make today will shape your organization’s future, determining whether you emerge as an industry leader or get left behind.

Our recent survey of more than 1,000 business and tech execs, conducted between June and July 2024, sheds light on this shift. We identified a select group of companies — 12% of those surveyed — that we call the “.” These companies are already reaping the rewards of their investments in AI and cloud technologies, setting the pace for what it means to be a successful, modern enterprise. This isn’t just a fleeting trend; it’s a strategic trajectory toward becoming AI-first, much like the transition to cloud-first businesses before them. For a personalized report that benchmarks your responses against survey respondents, explore our  feature, which provides real-time insights and shows how you compare to others in your industry.

It’s not just Top Performers that are seeing results. Among the rest of the companies in our survey (88% of respondents), many are also seeing early returns on their GenAI investments. For example, 41% say they’ve already seen improved customer experience through GenAI while 40% say they’ve already achieved increased productivity. Across each of the 10 categories we asked about, many companies say they’ve already achieved value — but Top Performers stand out because they’re 2X more likely than other companies to have done so.

As with any big opportunity, there’s risk. AI, for all its potential, carries inherent challenges — missteps in accuracy, organizational readiness and process optimization can derail progress. But the greater risk lies in doing nothing. Everything else can be addressed through hard work and  practices, which can help mitigate risk while unlocking value.

In this report, we’ll look at what the Top Performers are doing right, the areas where they still have room to grow and where your company should focus its efforts to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving environment.

## AI and cloud investments pay off for many companies—especially Top Performers

- **Cloud**
- **AI**

### Bar chart showing Cloud-powered value

|   | Top performers | Other companies |
|---|-----------------|----------------|
| Improved profitability | 74% | 32% |
| Increased productivity | 72% | 39% |
| Faster time to market | 69% | 35% |
| Improved customer experience | 69% | 40% |
| Products and services innovation | 69% | 34% |
| Cost savings | 65% | 35% |
| Optimized tax technology strategy | 61% | 30% |
| New channels to engage customers | 60% | 32% |
| New revenue streams | 59% | 30% |
| Market expansion | 53% | 29% |
| Optimized tax technology strategy | 59% | 27% |
| New channels to engage customers | 53% | 27% |
| Cost savings | 69% | 35% |
| Products and services innovation | 67% | 32% |
| Market expansion | 59% | 27% |
| Optimized tax technology strategy | 59% | 27% |

Source: PwC's 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey  
Q: Which of the following best describes how cloud technology is, or is not, delivering measurable value in your company in relation to revenue/cost/profitability? Which of the following best describes how generative AI is, or is not, delivering measurable value in your company in relation to revenue/cost/profitability? _(Response to 'Already achieved measurable value'.)_  
Base: Top performers 124, Other companies 906

- **12%** of respondents are Top Performers whose companies are 2X more likely to realize value than other companies.
- **63%** of Top Performers are increasing cloud budgets in order to leverage GenAI.

### How ‘intrinsic AI’ is resetting strategy

AI is fast becoming integral to every aspect of business — your strategy, your customer offerings, your capability systems (people, process and technology), even how you manage risk and preserve value. As AI rapidly becomes a natural part of how businesses operate and grow, it will bring disruptive change to every industry. Even companies that aren’t yet going big on AI will be affected by market shifts and need to consider how it changes business models, service provider relationships, the talent pool, stakeholder expectations, reporting requirements — everything.

So, what does an intrinsic-AI company look like? That will vary to some extent from industry to industry, but the unifying element will be AI-based systems and processes embedded into every level of the business and its strategy. Consider our Top Performers.

### Top Performers are twice as likely than other companies, on average, to have already:

- 72% of respondents are Top Performers whose companies are 2X more likely to realize value than other companies.
- **63%** of Top Performers are increasing cloud budgets in order to leverage GenAI.

### 1. Prioritize AI-powered cloud architectures to redefine strategy

As AI becomes ingrained in how companies do business, next-generation cloud architectures that take advantage of the latest AI capabilities are fueling modern business strategies. While most companies still think about AI as part of their technology strategy — or worse, spinning up disconnected AI initiatives across the business — Top Performers are going all-in, making it an integrated part of the business plan across functions. Two-thirds of Top Performers (67%) tell us they have a formalized strategy, including an approach to identifying, implementing and tracking the use of AI across the organization. Just 37% of other companies say the same.

While responsibility for technology architecture and cloud engineering typically falls to a company’s CIO and other tech leaders, the choices made establish a foundation that make AI-centric transformation and new business models possible — and that’s a CEO-level consideration. It’s crucial for CIOs to partner with their CEOs, perhaps in new ways, to make the right technology choices and inspire the rest of their organizations. Together, you can set expectations and continually demonstrate how various AI initiatives are fundamental to business strategy and growth.

Given AI’s applicability and impact to all areas of the business, every C-suite executive has an important role to play. In the near term, we expect more companies to appoint  to help establish that vision and drive strategy together with senior leadership from across the business. We’re seeing this strategic teaming happen in many areas. In the front office, for instance, CIOs team with CMOs to focus on hyper-personalization and loyalty ecosystems. At the same time, we see chief revenue officers looking at how their sales teams leverage AI to accelerate deal cycles, curate proposals and presentations, and accelerate general time to market for products.

In the middle office, CIOs work with COOs and their teams — including procurement, customer service, risk and sustainability leads — using AI to modernize and streamline their processes, which in turn helps the front office better meet customers where they are. It also provides internal teams with the ability to run the business at a higher velocity with less tech debt and cumbersome systems. In the back office, CIOs and their IT teams can drive new ways of working and reinvent backend systems to accelerate delivery and drive business strategy.

Far and away, the biggest behavioral difference between Top Performers and other companies in our survey is that 72% of the former say they’ve achieved “all-in cloud adoption” when it comes to modernizing data, compared to just 33% of other companies. By moving their data to cloud and making it more easily ingestible by large language models (LLMs), Top Performers are more readily able to unlock new value from their data as they integrate new AI capabilities.

Top Performers are also more mature than other companies when it comes to other cloud engineering disciplines — by a factor of more than 2X. For example, they’re all-in on cloud — meaning they’ve broadly adopted cloud — for security (70% versus 37%), AI (60% versus 27%), migration (59% versus 25%), app modernization (57% versus 27%), native app development (57% versus 24%) and industry-specific solutions (54% versus 25%), among other areas.

- **72%** of Top Performers are all-in on cloud data modernization.

### Top performers are all-in on cloud engineering

- **98%** of Top Performers say their company is well equipped in terms of its data architecture and governance needed to leverage GenAI.

- **67%** of Top Performers are all-in on cloud data modernization.

### 2. Double down on data modernization

That data is essential to success is nothing new, but GenAI raises the stakes. On the one hand, GenAI is helping companies do more with less. It can often find insights in unstructured data, whether customer phone call logs or holistic policy documents. It can also do more with more, like scanning and summarizing text, audio or imagery to find value in data sets that were too obscure, too poorly organized or too vast for employees to make use of.

As GenAI becomes a commodity product — with everyone using similar models from the same few vendors — it’s your data and specialty knowledge that will set you apart. Your data will allow you to customize models to help you offer unique products, services and experiences. To do that requires a new architecture and operating model, which includes an AI-ready data platform and appropriate governance.

Doing this hard work is an effective way to fully leverage AI and modern cloud architectures. Top Performing companies are already ahead of their competition here — 98% agree that their company is well equipped in terms of its data architecture and governance needed to leverage GenAI. More than two-thirds (69%) say they’ve already implemented data modernization to take advantage of GenAI (compared to just 31% of other companies). And they’re looking at all areas of the business. Eighty-two percent of Top Performers say most of their company’s front office data is in cloud, compared with 63% for other companies. Similarly, 74% have most of their middle-office data and 79% of back-office data in cloud. By comparison, other companies have just 52% of middle-office data and 61% of back-office data in the cloud.

Given that their data is more widely accessible, it’s no surprise that Top Performers are more than twice as likely to report being all-in on GenAI adoption across the business. Across the front, middle and back offices, they’re more than twice as likely as other companies to broadly use GenAI.

- **75%** of Top Performers have broadly adopted GenAI across the software development life cycle.

### Data modernization driving GenAI adoption across the business

- **98%** of Top Performers say their company is well equipped in terms of its data architecture and governance needed to leverage GenAI.

- **75%** of Top Performers have broadly adopted GenAI across the software development life cycle.

### 3. Evolve the IT function with AI to become a strategic powerhouse

With an AI-led company as the new North Star, reinventing IT is critical — and more feasible. The technology function’s role in driving new capabilities, products and services, and business models is contingent on embracing new ways of working through AI-powered workflows (also called agentic workflows). While this shift to a new operating model in which AI seamlessly performs work in concert with humans is happening across business functions, for many businesses IT is a natural place to start.

AI’s influence on the  is drawing significant attention as it drives revolutionary changes across the discipline. Software developers work alongside AI agents that can autonomously take ideas and turn them into requirements, then turn requirements into user stories, user stories into test cases, test cases into code and code into documentation. It’s an early example in which companies are already seeing considerable payback, with efficiency gains upwards of 30%, along with enhanced quality and speed to market.

But other areas of IT can see similar gains. Top Performers in our survey understand this potential. Sixty-five percent say they’ve holistically adopted AI in IT, including in app development and app management. This compares with just 28% of all-in adoption for other companies in our survey. Looking more closely, across 15 different IT areas Top Performers are consistently more likely than other companies to have broadly adopted GenAI. Eighty-two percent have broadly adopted GenAI for modernization versus 53% of other companies. In software development, 75% of Top Performers have broadly adopted GenAI, compared with 51% of other companies. Across the 15 IT categories, the delta for broad adoption between Top Performers and everyone else averages 23 percentage points.

The ways AI is changing IT extend well beyond internal capabilities. Most companies look to third parties for at least some software and application development, application maintenance, help desk IT service management and cybersecurity. How these suppliers leverage AI can also be transformative for you. Across industries, AI has reduced the hours IT vendors need to provide high-quality services to their customers. Given this shift, tech leaders can identify efficiencies and other KPIs that vendors should be achieving. This might drive companies to renegotiate contracts or select new solutions and suppliers.

### GenAI is reinventing how IT drives and supports business strategy

- **75%** of Top Performers have broadly adopted GenAI across the software development life cycle.

- **39%** of Top Performers are changing their relationships with CSPs by assessing the sustainability impact of its carbon footprint.

- **39%** of Top Performers are changing their relationships with CSPs by assessing the sustainability impact of its carbon footprint.

### 4. Reset cloud provider relationships and expectations

Even the most effective strategy can falter if you fail to maintain that same level of intention and engagement when dealing with suppliers and third parties. Cloud service providers (CSPs), from hyperscalers to LLM specialty vendors, are instrumental to your success as they continue to invest in and develop next-generation cloud and AI capabilities. They’re the bedrock that will make possible an AI-first economy, which could be here sooner than many of us expected.

With an abundance of providers and advanced tech offerings to choose from, how you manage your CSP strategy, contracts and interactions is key. That includes determining which and how many CSPs to employ based on your unique needs and industry requirements. CSP strategy was consistent from our last survey. A little over half of respondents, 56%, tell us they primarily use one CSP for more than half of their workloads and other CSPs for specialized tasks, up just a bit from 53% in 2022. Just over a quarter (27%) say they use one CSP exclusively, down from 34% in our last survey. Interestingly, Top Performers are more likely to say they use a single CSP (38%). About one-third (34%) report using public cloud in all areas of their businesses, and another half (51%) use it in at least some areas. Just 5% of all companies surveyed said they don’t use public cloud at all.

When asked about how well their primary CSPs were meeting expectations, most respondents rate them favorably, with Top Performers more likely to “strongly agree” that their CSPs are delivering. For example, they rate their CSPs favorably in providing them with KPIs and performance monitoring to get a handle on cloud usage (61% versus 39% for other companies), providing needed tech support (60% versus 46%) and engaging them around how the CSP is evolving its capabilities (61% versus 43%), along with similar sentiment in five other areas.

### Considerable potential to cultivate more strategic CSP relationships

- **39%** of Top Performers are changing their relationships with CSPs by assessing the sustainability impact of its carbon footprint.

- **12%** of respondents are Top Performers whose companies are 2X more likely to realize value than other companies.

### What are cloud and AI Top Performers?

We identify Top Performers based on two indexes of performance, cloud and generative AI (GenAI). We develop a cloud performance index based on the company’s cloud maturity and the measurable value it has achieved in areas such as revenue growth, profitability, capabilities and security. The scoring system awards 100 points for companies that have already achieved measurable value, 66 points for those expecting to achieve it within the next 12 months, 33 points for those expecting to achieve it in 12 or more months and 0 points for those not expecting measurable value in the next 12 months. Similarly, we develop a GenAI performance index based on a company’s current adoption of generative AI and the measurable value they have already achieved across those same areas. Finally, we classify 124 respondents (12% of the total sample) as overall Top Performers. These respondents score at the top range for both cloud and GenAI performance indexes.

### About the survey

Between June 4, 2024 and July 9, 2024, PwC surveyed 1,030 executives in the United States (308 in business roles, 722 in technology roles) on topics related to cloud and generative AI. Respondents are from companies that have at least $500 million in revenue.

Respondents operate across a range of industries, including tech, media, telecom (22%), financial services (21%), consumer markets (18%), health (17%), industrial products (13%) and energy, utilities and mining (6%).

PwC Research, PwC’s global Centre of Excellence for market research and insight, conducted this survey.

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