The promise of AI will be fulfilled only by establishing a clear, coherent link between AI and business value. This report will help CIOs incorporate AI into their strategic planning and evaluation processes for business transformation.
Opportunities and Challenges
- Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t an end in itself, but rather a strategic capability that organizations can develop and mature to achieve specific, measurable and transformative business outcomes.
- Only 4% of CIOs say their organization has deployed AI, but we expect a substantial increase in deployments as one-fifth say they are experimenting with AI, or have short-term plans for AI.
- Moving from pilots and short-term plans to large-scale implementations of AI is a daunting task that requires sound planning.
- Organizations will need new or updated strategies as vendors exploit AI capabilities within business suites, enterprise applications, platforms, infrastructure support services and the customer experience.
The wonder facts
- Start by prioritizing critical business scenarios and outcomes, before assessing the extent to which the use of AI in IT solutions could help you achieve desired outcomes.
- Normalize strategy development for AI capabilities, as you have for other advanced technologies while identifying AI’s unique requirements, which include data scientists, very large datasets and natural-language understanding.
- Use AI especially for tasks that require classification and prediction on an unprecedentedly large scale, which range from granular text autocorrection to strategic sales forecasting.
- Foster a culture of AI innovation by taking a “bimodal IT” approach that enables your organization to rapidly plan, test, assess and innovate with AI capabilities developed either in-house or integrated into vendors’ software applications, services and platforms.