AI Needs To Be More Strategic: What Does That Even Mean?

ByJoe McKendrick,

Senior Contributor.

Strategic artificial intelligence efforts will go much farther than tactical deployments. Okay, fine – but what makes an AI effort “strategic”?

The much-discussed 95%-fail study on generative AI published by researchers at MIT revealed that these efforts lacked a strategic focus, according to noted AI and analytics guru Tom Davenport, writing in a recent essay. “Its primary finding is that tactical, individual-level, broad-and-shallow implementations of generative AI don’t provide substantial value to the companies that employ them. Enterprise-level, deep-and-narrow generative AI projects that are consistent with a company’s business strategy, on the other hand, do often yield measurable value.”

Companies seeing success with AI, he adds, are those who see as a transformative force, versus merely productivity bumps or fancy pictures.