A new study has found that tech leaders are prioritizing the expansion of AI within their companies for 2025, which contrasts findings that AI adoption may be leveling off in the corporate world.
The main reason leaders are seeking to implement the new technology is related to boosting productivity levels. However, many leaders also expressed concerns for AI’s tendency to make errors, which runs the risk of harming their reputation.
The biggest concern for leaders, though, are connected to privacy and security. Therefore, many are implementing their own measures to ward against this, including ethical AI guidelines and privacy policies. There is also a need for the protection of sensitive information.
AI Expansion Is the Highest Priority for Tech Leaders
The 2025 Reveal Software Development Challenges Survey, released by Infragistics, has revealed that tech leaders are prioritizing the expansion of AI within their companies, with 73% having identified it as their primary focus for the year.
The study showed that 75% of organizations already used AI for software creation in 2024, and of the organizations who weren’t using the technology last year, 50% plan to this year.
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Similarly, those surveyed who are already using AI revealed some interesting outcomes in relation to hiring. 55% of those surveyed reported new job creation, with 63% of those adding as many as 25 new positions. This represents a more positive shift in the AI-job discourse, particularly as some companies and CEOs have shared bleaker statistics when it comes to the future of jobs.
Companies Are Adopting AI to Increase Productivity
As to why companies are looking to adopt AI, the primary reason appeared to be boosting productivity levels using task automation, according to more than half (55%) of respondents. Other reasons include optimizing code (48%), improving diagnostics (46%), testing software (46%) and fixing code errors (43%), among others.
However, whether AI is effective at generally increasing productivity is up for debate. A recent study has shown that AI may make workers less productive, by creating new tasks for them to complete. This is often the case when individuals have to go through AI-generated work and correct or check for any errors.
Those surveyed seem very much aware of AI’s ability to blunder, too. More than one third (37%) of respondents flagged the risk of errors, bugs, and inefficiencies in AI-generated code, which could largely affect business performance and reliability.
Despite Boost, AI Privacy Remains a Concern
The main concern for tech leaders, however, was data privacy, with 78% of respondents citing it as their top issue. Privacy violations (38%), bias in AI models (37%), and the deployment of AI tools that have not been securely tested (36%) were also top concerns.
“Organizations must implement governance frameworks and technical safeguards to ensure safe, strategic implementation.” – Casey Ciniello, senior product manager at Infragistics.
Issues with privacy reflect concerns about how AI systems are developed and deployed. Many organizations, therefore, are implementing their own methods of combating this issue. Over 60% are implementing ethical AI guidelines, and 59% are issuing formal privacy policies to protect against misuse. 54% are also putting systems in place to protect any sensitive information.
Considering that leading AI company OpenAI has been breached more than 1,000 times, we can’t blame businesses for exercising caution.
