Despite the general economic downturn, cloud costs are the primary spender for US businesses, a recent report has found. Then again, artificial intelligence (AI) still ranks fifth.

In keeping with a survey of 100 corporate finance executives conducted by Battery, a US corporate finance research firm, 79% of respondents ranked cloud spending as their top priority, TechCrunch reported on the eighth (local time).

In keeping with this, because of this of prioritizing spending areas with multiple responses, data warehouses (64%) ranked second, followed by cloud at first, and enterprise security (56%) ranked third. An information warehouse refers to managing and analyzing accrued data to assist firms make decisions.

Recently, emerging data operations and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning stayed in fourth and fifth with 44% and 43%, respectively.

On this regard, experts analyze that it’s because AI is less differentiated than existing solutions within the case of atypical tasks, while it takes time or has a structure of ‘high risk, high return’ in areas where groundbreaking results might be achieved.

As well as, it is usually identified that an AI project might be successful only when there’s knowledgeable manager who selects appropriate data required for machine learning.

The survey included 100 corporate finance executives, 85% of whom were large enterprises with 1,000 or more employees.

In keeping with TechCrunch, while the expansion trend for technology budgets has slowed somewhat, most large enterprises appear to be taking a rather less conservative stance on software spending.

Particularly, despite the fee increase, ‘clouds (clouds) haven’t yet collapsed from the sky’.

Reporter Lim Dae-jun ydj@aitimes.com