Currents Report: How Growing Tech Businesses Use AI Today

Introduction

Currents is DigitalOcean’s report on trends impacting developers at growing tech businesses around the world. For our latest edition, we focused on how these growing businesses are adapting to the increased adoption of artificial intelligence. The rise of AI has created opportunities for individual developers and businesses, but integrating new tools and technologies is not without challenges, especially for those who are not large enterprises with teams dedicated to AI. This report, gathered responses from over 1,000 developers around the world, examines how widespread adoption of AI really is, what challenges developers face when it comes to AI adoption, how usage of AI tools differs based on company size and other factors, and what the biggest upcoming trends are.

The findings reveal a significant growth opportunity, as 21% of organizations have yet to implement AI formally in any form. Despite this, there is clear interest in AI innovation: 66% of respondents are engaged in passion projects exploring AI, and 36% are actively investigating capabilities without having launched formal initiatives. For small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular, AI adoption could be a game-changer by allowing developers to take on multiple roles more easily—but they must first overcome key barriers, such as high Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) costs and lack of internal knowledge on how to best leverage these tools.

Key findings:

AI adoption is increasing, but still has growth potential

AI adoption has increased significantly over the past year—in November 2023, we found that 49% of respondents had used AI for business use, and a year later, 79% say their organization is integrating AI in some form. However, there is still clear room for more growth and maturity in organizations’ AI usage, as 32% say they are just starting to explore AI, and just 11% consider themselves an AI-driven business.

Cost and knowledge are barriers for entry for SMEs

The high upfront costs of GPUs are a challenge for 34% of businesses, along with the lack of knowledge around how to optimize GPUs. Smaller companies feel this more acutely, and sometimes struggle to justify investments in AI as they find it challenging to demonstrate a clear return on investment from these activities, and have a lack of dedicated in-house AI resources.

Trust, safety, and integration concerns

Other challenges with adoption for AI include integrating AI into existing workflows and choosing the right AI model. Looking at the most urgent issues in the AI space today, 47% say reliance on unverified LLM data is a top concern, along with ensuring AI data is unbiased.

Upcoming trends in AI

While areas such as agentic AI are already growing quickly, we looked at what respondents feel is the next frontier of AI, and found that Advanced Multi Modal Systems, Real Time Audio Translation, and Automated Machine Learning are the next most compelling. Organizations currently are primarily using AI for improving internal processes and operations and enhancing their existing services with AI/ML.

Read the report

These findings make it clear—accessible AI solutions are key to unlocking AI for businesses of all sizes, especially those without large teams dedicated to AI transformation. Affordable GPU compute and approachable AI tools will help alleviate the challenges many developers are currently facing when it comes to AI, and enable them to integrate AI solutions more efficiently.

Visit our Currents webpage for the full report and graphs and sign up to explore DigitalOcean’s Generative AI platform and GPU offerings.