Survey Shows Healthcare Firms Facing Skills Shortage for Implementing GenAI

ABBYY, a technology company specializing in AI-powered document processing and automation, published a new survey, conducted by Opinium Research, revealing the challenges faced by healthcare organizations trying to integrate sophisticated GenAI technology. As a result, almost a quarter (22 percent) of respondents completely pulled the plug on AI tools, and nearly one-third (31 percent) scaled back their use.

The survey revealed that 42 percent of healthcare leaders reported that employees lacked the necessary skills to deploy GenAI, compared to 29 percent globally. Thirty-four percent of the survey respondents indicated that training the models was harder than expected, and 31 percent did not have proper governance in place.

However, the study concluded that all those who stuck with GenAI technology and finished deployment expressed satisfaction with the results after enhancing it with other technologies and providing extensive staff training.

Looking ahead, just 24 percent of healthcare managers expect to increase budgets by more than 20 percent.

“It seems that financial services leaders spent money on GenAI tools that promised more than they can provide,” Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI at ABBYY, said in a statement.  “In some cases, they didn’t even need it.”

According to ABBYY, one of the goals of using GenAI in healthcare was to monitor staff performance (19 percent), which is significantly higher than in other industries such as financial services (6 percent), retail (7 percent), and IT (10 percent). Staff are optimistic about GenAI, with 88 percent of leaders saying workers are positive about using it.