Many CEOs are buying into the AI revolution wholeheartedly, but a study published by MIT in July was a wake-up call to the challenge of extracting value from the new technology. The report found that 95% of organizations are getting no measurable return from their investment in generative AI.
Scaling gen AI projects beyond the pilot phase is fundamental to turning the current AI hype cycle into real ROI. How can companies get over the hump? For starters, they should stop trying to introduce AI to every facet of operations, says Abhijit Dubey, CEO of NTT Data, an IT services and consulting company.
“What happens is companies say, ‘In every single domain, I’m going to unleash innovation, and I’m going to have AI enablement.’ I think that’s the wrong strategy,” Dubey said at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh on Sunday. The right strategy, he noted, is to “pick one or two domains that are going to create disproportionate economic value for the company and go end to end.” He gave the example of focusing on underwriting in insurance and supply chains in manufacturing.
FedEx has been intentional about integrating AI into three broad areas: internal operations, customer experience, and creating new value levers for customers (such as improving demand forecasting and reducing returns), said Kami Viswanathan, FedEx’s president of the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, and Africa region. “Research has shown that organizations that have a clear AI strategy, which has this prioritization, have a much greater degree of success than others that don’t, right? So for us, that’s the key aspect of scaling.”
