AI proves its worth, but few scale impact
As you might expect, the survey shows that “Respondents from these AI high performers report that they achieve greater scale and see both higher revenue increases and greater cost decreases than other companies that use AI”.
The article lists various core practices that scale AI and compares leaders’ adoption of those practices with everyone else. Several showed approximately a 4x difference.
Leaders are 4 times as likely to have an AI strategy with a clear set of use cases. Leaders are not looking at the data to see what it says, they are using their data to solve problems they have already identified. We help clients do this by identifying the decisions they want to improve – DecisionsFirst™ as we like to say – something both Forrester and McKinsey have suggested also.
Leaders are also 4 times as likely to have standard tools and methodologies and to know how frequently their AI models must be updated. They are integrating AI development into their development approach and lifecycle. We use our DecisionsFirst approach to ensure this, building on industry standard methodologies like CRISP-DM to bring AI into the requirements process as well as the IT development process while focusing on continuous improvement to keep things up to date.
Leaders are 4 times as likely to be focused on using AI in front-line decision-making and on tracking business metrics that show the value of AI. We help our clients ensure this by focusing on operational decision-making, day-to-day transactional decisions, and by tying these decisions to the business metrics that matter. We also ensure that front-line staff and AI are integrated by building decision models that include human, rules-based and machine learning-based decisions in a single, coherent picture.
The last of these is particularly noteworthy. Not only does McKinsey identify this focus on front-line decisions as critical, they also note that only a third of the best AI companies are doing it well. That means even the leaders are leaving huge value on the table.
AI is going to change the world, but only once it is adopted and integrated into your front-line decisions. Our DecisionsFirst approach uses decision modeling, the right mix of technology and a focus on continuous improvement to make sure our clients are leaders. If you’re fed up with being a laggard, perhaps you should contact us?