TLDR: A recent ABBYY survey indicates that 21% of workers are misusing generative AI tools, often for personal productivity, highlighting significant challenges in training, integration, and governance for businesses adopting GenAI. Despite high satisfaction with AI deployments when supported by additional tools, future investment in GenAI remains cautious.
A new report by ABBYY, titled ‘State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Disillusionment and AI Wishlist,’ has brought to light significant challenges faced by businesses in their adoption of generative AI (GenAI) tools. The survey, conducted by Opinium between June 20 and July 8, 2025, among 1,200 senior managers in companies with over 100 employees across the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Singapore, reveals that one in five workers (21%) are misusing GenAI tools. This misuse often involves employees leveraging GenAI for personal productivity rather than official company initiatives, with 20% of leaders reporting such instances.
The report identifies training, integration, and governance as the primary sticking points for businesses. Approximately 31% of business leaders found training AI models more difficult than anticipated, while 28% cited difficulties in integrating GenAI tools into existing workflows. Governance issues were a concern for 26% of respondents, suggesting a lack of proper oversight in some GenAI deployments.
To address these gaps, many businesses are turning to other AI systems. The survey found that 35% of companies adopted process intelligence, another 35% utilized document AI, and 25% implemented retrieval augmented generation. These supplementary AI tools have contributed to a high satisfaction rate, with 98% of respondents reporting contentment with their GenAI deployments. They cited benefits such as more consistent outputs, better integration into workflows, improved accuracy, and higher trust.
Despite these positive outcomes, future investment in AI appears to be cautious. Most companies anticipate their AI budgets to grow by only 16-20% next year, with a mere 11% planning to increase spending by 50% or more.
Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI at ABBYY, commented on the findings: “Businesses spent money on GenAI tools that promised more than they can provide. In some cases, they didn’t even need it. Before moving forward with GenAI tools for agentic automation, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”
The ABBYY findings are consistent with other research in the field. A separate survey by Howdy, involving over 1,000 US professionals, indicated that 75% of workers are now expected to use AI in their jobs. However, 22% feel pressured to use AI in uncomfortable ways, and 16% admit to pretending to use AI when they are not. This highlights a disconnect between corporate enthusiasm for AI and the support provided to employees.
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Shadow AI, where individuals use readily available tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Perplexity without corporate oversight, is also a growing concern. Ulf Persson, CEO at ABBYY, emphasized the importance of secure and strategic adoption: “GenAI is creating remarkable opportunities to reimagine how work gets done, which is rightfully generating a great deal of excitement. However, shadow AI, when individuals use commonly available tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Perplexity without oversight at work, potentially raises serious data privacy and compliance concerns. The corporate benefits of GenAI’s potential are truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority.”
