According to a new report from the IT experts at Spiceworks, Microsoft’s Cortana has become the most commonly used A.I. chatbot used in workspaces in North America and Europe. In fact, of the companies surveyed by the firm – some of which utilize more than one assistant – nearly half are using Cortana. Falling in just behind that are the 47-percent that are using Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant comes in at third with just 23-percent. Surprisingly, given how much of a lead the company owns in the home environment, Amazon’s Alexa only sees use at 13-percent with expectations that it will close the gap with Google over the next year. However, the figures probably shouldn’t be too surprising here since most of the tools’ use seems to result from OS-level implementations. Cortana is a reasonably big part of the most common operating system, Microsoft’s Windows OS.
Breaking down the figures, however, the digital assistants have not yet reached most businesses and their use is actually fairly limited. Just 29-percent of those surveyed had any kind of A.I. assistant being used at work in any way or knew of plans to incorporate them in the next year. Larger corporations were more likely to utilize them with 24-percent using at least one and as many as 40-percent expected to over the next 12 months. Team collaboration and calendar management tasks fell in as the second and third most common uses, with each seeing use at around half of that for voice typing or dictation. Similarly, the IT department at any given business was around twice as likely to use the assistants as any other department – at approximately 53-percent. Customer service and administration departments took second and third with 23-percent and 20-percent respectively.
Having said that, the figures may still be growing very quickly with consideration for the number of errors noted in their use. As many as 59-percent reported that their digital helpers misunderstood either basic human dialogue or requests. Any limits to the use of A.I. assistants, meanwhile, seems to be mostly tied up with the limited number of use cases businesses tend to find for their implementation. Security and cost were other big reasons listed but didn’t begin to approach the 50-percent which cited limited or lack of purpose.
