ABBYY Survey Reveals Disillusionment with Generative AI

Challenges Sparked by BYOS are Causing Shadow IT Risks

New survey results from ABBYY’s State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment report pinpoints the challenges business leaders are facing as they implement generative AI (GenAI) technology – leading to the need to use other AI tools to improve outputs.

The survey by Opinium Research, commissioned by ABBYY, revealed over a quarter (27%) of US business leaders say training GenAI models was harder than expected. The same number said it was difficult to integrate into their business processes, while 24% said staff misused the tools. In addition, 23% said it was too expensive, 22% did not have proper governance, and a fifth (20%) had problems with hallucinations – when incorrect information is provided.

Many business leaders said they were able to address the challenges by introducing other technologies, with 40% using AI agents, over a third (36%) turning to process intelligence, 31% using Document AI, and 23% introducing retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

Adding these technologies resulted in 98% of US businesses ultimately being happy with their GenAI results – seeing better consistency of outputs (58%), better integration into existing workflows (50%), more accurate and reliable results (48%), greater cost efficiency and savings (44%) and increased user trust (42%).

The survey showed over a fifth of respondents are experiencing “Shadow AI”, with 22% of US business leaders saying that GenAI is only being used in the company because employees bring it for personal productivity, rather than as part of management-driven initiatives. This means shadow AI is higher in the US than other countries such as the UK (12%) France (19%), Germany (21%) and Australia (17%), although in Singapore 26% of employees admitted to Bring Your Own Software (BYOS).

The research also looked at the reasons behind introducing GenAI, with four in ten (43%) of US business leaders admitting that a driving factor for investment was that employees were already using it on a BYOS basis. This was higher than other regions such as the UK (39%) and France (32%).

More than half (53%) say staff use it to “make them look smarter and more professional”, while 55% say it helps reduce workload and supports creativity. Generally, staff are optimistic about GenAI, with 91% of leaders saying they enjoy positive results. However, in the USA, the biggest bug bear with GenAI is that it can lie. Given a wish list of improvements to GenAI, almost a quarter (23%) of US workers requested GenAI would admit when it didn’t know the answer – this was higher than workers in the UK (15%) and Germany (13%).

In terms of investment, 42% of respondents said they have spent between $200K and $1M on AI in the last year, with the average spend in the US being $795K. As for budgets next year, the average increase is expected to be 22%, while 9% of respondents will raise budgets by over 50%.

Access the full State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment and AI Wishlist report at https://www.abbyy.com/resources/report/state-of-intelligent-automation-genai-2025/ for more information.

Methodology

Opinium research of 1,200 senior managers or above in companies of 100+ employees in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore. Research undertaken between 20^th of June and 8^th of July 2025.

This press announcement is a global summarization of the survey results. Please use the links below for country-specific announcements:

• Australia
• Singapore
• United Kingdom
• Global