Mazars publishes Tech Train study revealing global technological familiarity, investment and implementation levels

Mazars publishes thought leadership revealing the extent to which the global C-suite are familiar with, investing in, and implementing five key workplace technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Mazars, the international audit and advisory firm, announces the release of its new report “Are you missing the Tech Train? Global investment and implementation surrounding transformative technologies”. More than 600 C-suite executives based in six countries (China, France, Germany, India, UK and US) and working in different industries, sectors, and organisation sizes share insight on these game-changing technologies, their investment appetites, the barriers they face to technological implementation - and how to overcome them.

CHINA AND INDIA LEAD, FRANCE AND UK LAG

Familiarity: Leaders in China are the most familiar with these five key technologies (79%), followed by Germany (71%), India (69%), US (64%). France and the UK come bottom (53%, 44%.) AI is the technology most respondents feel familiar with.

Investment: Respondents in India have the greatest appetite for increasing the budgets they dedicate to these five technologies. France and UK respondents are most reluctant to increase their budgets (as below.)

Implementation: China and India are the most likely to have implemented at least one of the technologies and share the highest adoption rates for all five technologies. France and UK are the least likely to have implemented any of the technologies.

Although 22% have already integrated new technologies into internal processes, most of the respondents - 27% - said they did not include any of these in the short-term strategy.

Sector splits

Insurance and manufacturing are the top sectors where the five technologies have already been implemented. Leaders in the public sector were least likely to have implemented any of the five - 50% of respondents working in the public sector said ‘nothing is happening’ with the five technologies.

Benefits and barriers

Cost savings (27%), business model transformation (26%) and improvements in quality (24%) are the top three expected benefits of the five technologies.

The most cited barriers globally to implementing technologies are: obtaining necessary financial resources (25%), finding talent and skills that can fully grasp and exploit the technology (23%) and market maturity (22%).

Guillaume Devaux, Partner, Head of Technology Sector at Mazars, comments: “Our findings show strong forward momentum in regard to these five game-changing technologies – with China and India leading the pack. Overall, familiarity levels are high, leaders see the impact these technologies can have, and they have plans to increase investment. But there are areas of concern and certain sectors and countries pale in comparison with others.”

Devaux adds, “Leaders who think they’re falling behind need to discover which technology will create significant competitive advantage for their organisation. They should remember that successful tech transformation journeys require broad backing - from a company’s leadership and the team at large. Leaders may set the vision - but they must work with others to realise it.”

ROMANIAN MARKET AND TECHNOLOGIES

The increasing presence of new technologies in business processes can be a significant efficiency-boosting factor and it can considerably enhance the organization’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives.

RPA is one of the technologies which leads to significant cost savings, according to 31% of our respondents, while ERP proves to be very useful taking into consideration the improvement of compliance policies, according to 28% of our respondents.

„Out of those five technologies, the Romanian RPA market has not reached yet a state of equilibrium, but it is moving towards maturity, due to a lot of forward-looking companies that are launching different RPA initiatives. As per our global study, more than half of the respondents (57%) already spent over 25% of their IT budgets on a combination of these technologies. But is 25% enough? Will the growth of companies be affected by this number? The budgets in our country are not yet adequate, companies still working on achieving an understanding of what innovation means from both a business and an employee perspective.”, mentioned Razvan Butucaru, Partner, Financial Services & Advisory Leader, Mazars Romania.

Coming back to the global Mazars study, 26% of respondents said they are investing more than 10% of their current IT budget on IoT. Compared to the other countries covered by the study, Romania is still at the beginning when talking about projects relating to IoT, like smart homes or smart cities. Considering the latest, Alba Iulia was the pilot on this one, having the unique objective of integrating physical, digital and human systems into smart cities, which will increase process efficiency, reduce costs and improve quality of life, while ensuring a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for citizens. We still have a lot of work to do regarding the future of IoT.

Businesses need to appreciate that no technology comes without risks and an ability to mitigate these – namely cyber security - must now come together with technological adoption and investment.

When talking about new technologies on the local market, we have to take into account that cybersecurity risks are customary and are never completely eliminated. According to the global study, compliance and cyberattacks were the top two challenges that decision-makers said kept them up at night – 58% and 56% respectively marked them as key concerns. „Statistically speaking, 60% of the worldwide incidents are produced by the user's mistakes. In Romania, the cyber attacks seem to have an increasing trend. Companies should allocate more efforts in developing internal measures ranging from strengthening the IT Governance framework, performing vulnerabilities assessments and increasing employee awareness through training.”, mentioned Horatiu Nistor, Senior Manager, IT Audit & Advisory, Mazars Romania.

Media Contact

Emilia Popa, Head of Marketing and Communication, Mazars Romania

Emilia.Popa@mazars.ro | +40741.111.042

About Mazars

Mazars is an internationally integrated partnership, specialising in audit, accountancy, advisory, tax and legal services[1]. Operating in 91 countries and territories around the world, we draw on the expertise of 40,400 professionals – 24,400 in the Mazars integrated partnership and 16,000 via the Mazars North America Alliance – to assist clients of all sizes at every stage in their development.

In Romania, Mazars has 25 years of experience in audit and financial consulting, tax services, accounting, payroll and personnel administration. The local team is formed of 220 professionals. 

www.mazars.ro | https://www.linkedin.com/MazarsRomania/

About the Mazars Tech Pulse Survey

The Mazars 2019 Tech Pulse Survey was conducted by YouGov on behalf of Mazars to evaluate familiarity, implementation and investment levels among technological decision makers around the world. It explored these trends in relation to five key workplace technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The online survey targeted C-suite executives across China, France, Germany, India, the UK and the US. More than 600 responses were received. The results of the survey were analysed by Mazars.

[1] Where permitted under applicable country laws