Ai towards maturity in Italia: +50% in one year

The numbers of the latest research by the Artificial Intelligence Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, which Il Sole 24 Ore had the opportunity to preview, speak for themselves: by 2025, the AI turnover in Italia will have reached EUR 1.8 billion, with a growth of 50% in just one year and an acceleration that is unprecedented in the recent digital landscape.

Have we therefore reached the coveted maturity stage? Probably yes, considering the new composition of expenditure items, which see Generative AI solutions and hybrid tools now covering almost half the value of investments (46% to be precise), while the remaining slice remains tied to traditional machine learning applications. As Giovanni Miragliotta, director of the AI Observatory, also confirms, 'text and language analysis and processing now account for 40% of the market value, surpassing for the first time the areas related to data analysis: this is an almost epoch-making turning point, which gives us a precise measure of the impact of generative AI on the development of this technology'.

A breakthrough that reflects AI's ability to insinuate itself into decision-making and cognitive processes, as well as industrial processes, but which requires, according to the expert, 'a major strengthening of managerial skills to navigate between the over-communication and the difficulties of innovation in the operating model'.

At present, 'tailor-made' application projects built around the specificities of the individual company are still dominant, absorbing 77% of the overall expenditure; on the other hand, it is services and software licences that show the highest growth rates (84% of large companies have purchased Gen AI tools, an increase of 31% year-on-year), a sign of a progressive maturation of the offer. If we look at adoption levels, however, the pervasiveness of AI is not so substantial: 71% of large companies have in fact launched at least one project (compared to 59% in 2024), but only one in five uses the technology across multiple functions and only a minority measure returns in a structured way by estimating ex-ante the cost-benefit ratio.

Not to mention the much 'hailed' Process Orchestration and Agentic AI systems, which only account for 4% of expenditure. Organisational transformation, according to the indicators just mentioned, still seems to be proceeding slowly, reflected in the gap concerning SMEs, where the spread of AI remains limited (the sector weighs 18% in value terms and the rate of experimentation is 15% in medium-sized companies and 7% in small ones) despite the presence of growing interest. 'AI,' concluded Miragliotta, 'faces at least three major challenges. The first is to find a balance between expectations and real benefits from adoption; the second is to continue with research and training programmes once the resources of the NRP have been exhausted; and the third, of global scope, concerns the financial sustainability of the huge investments being made'.