Generative AI at work: what companies actually put into production
One year of generative AI in companies, measured against the announcements: what reached production, why internal tools went first, and which governance questions regulators raised before any law existed.
Contents
Between mid-2022 and mid-2023, generative AI moved fast in announcements and slowly in production. A Gartner poll of 2,544 executives run in March and April 2023 put 19% in pilot or production mode. What reached daily work was internal: coding assistants, drafting and summarizing, with a person checking the output.
Key takeaways
- In Gartner's poll of 2,544 executives, 70% were investigating or exploring generative AI and 19% were in pilot or production.
- Developer tooling moved first: 92% of 500 US developers at large companies reported using AI coding tools, in a GitHub survey published on 13 June 2023.
- Use ran ahead of trust. Stack Overflow's 2023 survey found 44% of developers using AI tools and 3% highly trusting their accuracy.
- The first hard questions were legal. Italy's Garante limited OpenAI's processing on 30 March 2023 and Spain's AEPD opened an investigation on 13 April 2023.
What the adoption numbers actually say
Gartner surveyed 2,544 executive leaders in March and April 2023, and 45% said the publicity around ChatGPT had pushed them to increase AI investment. In the same poll, 70% were investigating and exploring, and 19% in pilot or production. Gartner notes the respondents were webinar attendees, not a representative sample.
Hold the Spanish baseline next to that. Before any of this, 12.6% of Spanish companies with 10 or more employees used some AI technology in the first quarter of 2022, according to the INE survey published on 18 October 2022. A year of announcements does not move a base like that quickly.
A Gartner poll of 2,544 executive leaders, conducted in March and April 2023, found 70% of organizations in investigation or exploration mode with generative AI and 19% in pilot or production. Gartner states the sample is not representative of the market.
The tools that reached daily work were internal
The clearest signal came from software teams. A GitHub survey of 500 US developers at companies with more than 1,000 employees, fielded in March 2023 and published in June, reported 92% using AI coding tools. Stack Overflow's survey, out the same week, found 44% using them in development and 26% planning to, with ChatGPT and Copilot taking most of the use.
Office tooling was still gated. Microsoft opened the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program on 9 May 2023 as an invitation-only, paid preview for 600 customers — an announcement, not a rollout.
The pattern is consistent. Drafting, summarizing, code completion and internal search all share one property: a wrong output costs a correction, not a claim.
Stack Overflow's 2023 Developer Survey, published on 13 June 2023, found 44% of developers using AI tools in their development process and 26% planning to, while 3% said they highly trust the accuracy of what those tools produce.
Why announcements ran ahead of deployments
A demo needs one good answer. Production needs an acceptable distribution of answers, a way to tell when one is wrong, and someone accountable when it is. Teams that stalled this year stalled on the second and third, not on the model.
The other recurring blocker is the state of the content the system is meant to use. Retrieval only works over material that is structured, current and permissioned, which is the content-modeling problem that decides whether a site survives a redesign. Without that groundwork, pilots produced fluent answers about the wrong version of a document.
Ownership is the third. An assistant that touches customer records is an operations change, and transformation projects fail as operations problems, not technology problems.
The governance questions that arrived first
On 30 March 2023 Italy's Garante ordered a temporary limitation on OpenAI's processing of Italian users' data, citing no legal basis, missing information to data subjects, inaccurate personal data in outputs and no age verification. On 13 April the Spanish AEPD opened its own investigation and asked the European Data Protection Board to take up ChatGPT, which set up a task force.
None of this is settled law. On 14 June 2023 the European Parliament adopted its negotiating position on the proposed AI regulation by 499 votes to 28, with 93 abstentions, and talks with the Council began the same day. That text asks providers of foundation models to publish summaries of copyrighted training data and to disclose generated content, but the final wording is open.
On 30 March 2023 Italy's data protection authority ordered a temporary limitation on OpenAI's processing under Article 58(2)(f) GDPR. On 13 April 2023 Spain's AEPD opened its own investigation, and the European Data Protection Board created a ChatGPT task force.
What to do before the rules are settled
Start with a written inventory of where these tools are already in use. Then give staff one approved route with a contract behind it, and a short list of data classes that never leave the company, whatever the interface.
For anything that reaches a customer, keep a named person accountable and keep the prompts and responses for the processes that matter. Logging is cheap now and expensive to reconstruct later.
Companies financing tooling with public money should read the catalog: today the Kit Digital categories cover website, e-commerce, customer management and process management, with no generative AI category. And a good brief still beats a good model, because most failed projects start with the wrong question.
FAQ
Can a company in Spain use ChatGPT with customer data?
Only with a lawful basis, a processing agreement that covers it, and information given to the people concerned. The AEPD opened an investigation into OpenAI on 13 April 2023 and the Italian authority ordered a temporary limitation on 30 March 2023, both on those grounds. Treat pasted customer data as a disclosure.
Does European AI legislation already apply?
No. In July 2023 the AI regulation is a proposal. The European Parliament adopted its negotiating position on 14 June 2023 and talks with the Council began the same day, so obligations, scope and dates can still change. Data protection law, however, already applies to every one of these systems.
What should a small company measure before scaling a pilot?
Three things: how often the output is accepted without edits, how long a person spends checking it, and the cost per request at expected volume. Without those numbers a pilot cannot be compared with the process it replaces, and enthusiasm from the team that built it is not evidence.
The order that worked this year was unglamorous: pick one internal process that already has a reviewer, instrument acceptance and cost, then decide. Companies that started with a customer-facing assistant mostly rebuilt it. Within six months we will know whether the European negotiation reaches ordinary business use or stops at model providers.
