Staff shrinkage at record level

According to a long-term study by the market research and consulting company ISG, the rate was 21.2 percent at the end of 2021. After fluctuation almost halved from 20 to 11 percent in the first year of the corona pandemic, it has already returned to pre-crisis levels since the third quarter of 2021. Over the course of the past year, more than one in five employees left their company voluntarily or for reasons of age. The IT providers affected by this are increasingly required to hire new staff and make them productive in a timely manner. But are these measures enough?

Increasingly, companies are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to compensate for staff shrinkage and loss of expertise. This is also the conclusion of the study "Limitless: The Positive Power of AI" by Cloudera, for which around 13,000 decision-makers and professionals in companies worldwide were surveyed, including 1,200 people in Germany. The study examines the changing perception of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and data analytics among corporate decision makers and professionals. The data makes it clear that the framework conditions are now in place for companies to drive their AI strategy forward.

The research findings disprove the long-held assumption that workers fear AI will take their jobs. An explosion in the volume of data available to companies today has made AI a common thread in many areas of work and a powerful ally. Nearly half of German professionals report their daily tasks have been enhanced or automated by AI (45 percent), ML (41 percent) and data analytics (54 percent) in the past 12 months. The biggest benefits are time savings (37 percent) and accuracy of their work results (31 percent). Overall, 72 percent of professionals say they are satisfied with taking on a new work task as part of AI.