More than a third of businesses are adopting process intelligence to overcome generative artificial intelligence (AI) challenges. That’s according to a new report from ABBYY.
Survey results from the vendor’s State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment and AI Wishlist report pinpoint the obstacles business leaders are facing as they implement generative AI technology, leading to the need to use other tools to improve outputs.
Businesses face stark generative AI challenges
The report indicates that nearly a third (31 percent) of business leaders find training generative AI models harder than expected, while 28 percent say the tools were difficult to integrate into their business processes. Worryingly, a fifth (21 percent) say staff are misusing generative AI tools.
The survey also revealed that a fifth of businesses are experiencing shadow AI, with 20 percent of business leaders saying that generative AI is only being used by employees for their own personal productivity, rather than as part of management-driven initiatives.
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Process intelligence helps businesses overcome generative AI challenges
Many business leaders were able to address generative AI challenges by using other technologies, with 35 percent turning to process intelligence. The same proportion are using document AI and a quarter introducing retrieval augmented generation (RAG), according to ABBYY.
Adding these technologies were contributing factors to 98 percent of businesses being happy with their generative AI tools, resulting in better consistency of outputs (50 percent), better integration into existing workflows (45 percent), more accurate and reliable results (43 percent), increased user trust (43 percent) and greater cost efficiency and savings (42 percent).
“Businesses spent money on generative AI tools that promised more than they can provide. In some cases, they didn’t even need it,” said Maxime Vermeir, senior director of AI at ABBYY. “Before moving forward with generative AI tools for agentic automation, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”
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The rise and risks of generative AI
The rise of generative AI has been staggering but the widespread growth and adoption of generative AI tools introduces new risks.
Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of organizations currently use generative AI to support business transformation, with 58 percent looking to increase investment in generative AI in the next 12 months, the PEX Report 2025/26 indicates. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts global end-user spending on generative AI models to total US$14.2 billion in 2025.
“Generative AI is creating remarkable opportunities to reimagine how work gets done, which is rightfully generating a great deal of excitement,” said Ulf Persson, CEO at ABBYY. “However, shadow AI, when individuals use commonly available tools like ChatGPT, Grok or Perplexity without oversight at work, potentially raises serious data privacy and compliance concerns. The corporate benefits of generative AI’s potential are truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority.”