R E G I O N A L C H E C K- U P

AI at the edge, 22 % are actively in production with limited deployment and 34 % are testing with plans to deploy within the next 24 months. This widespread adoption spans industries, with retail( 50 %) and manufacturing( 40 %) leading in full deployments.

Current and future edge AI applications

Customer experience applications currently dominate edge AI implementations, with 80 % of CIOs deploying edge AI for use cases that enhance the customer experience, like retail store operations, display personalisation and quality control. Risk management applications follow closely at 77 %, including predictive maintenance, safety compliance, anomaly detection and physical security.

Planned deployments for 2025 – 2026 show a shift in priorities, with cost reduction( 74 %) and risk management( 73 %) leading future implementations. This indicates that organisations increasingly focus on operational efficiencies and risk mitigation after initial customer-facing deployments.

Industry differences are notable, with 93 % of retail CIOs implementing edge AI for customer experience, compared to 80 % across all industries. Manufacturing strongly focuses on process acceleration for future deployments( 82 % vs. 68 % overall), highlighting industry-specific optimisation needs.

Multimodal AI leading at the edge

The survey reveals that multimodal AI – which combines speech, text and vision capabilities – is the most commonly deployed AI model at the edge( 60 %) and in the cloud( 59 %). This indicates that organisations are

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