On "Winning with AI", and New Opportunities
Photo by Ray Hennessy
Last week, MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group released the report “ Winning with AI” based on a survey of more than 2,500 executives and 17 interviews with leading experts. Comments included:
“9 out of 10 respondents agree that AI represents a business opportunity for their company.
“Many AI initiatives fail. Seven out of 10 companies surveyed report minimal or no impact from AI so far. Among the 90% of companies that have made at least some investment in AI, fewer than 2 out of 5 report obtaining any business gains from AI in the past three years. This number improves to 3 out of 5 when we include companies that have made significant investments in AI.
“Companies that focus solely on the production of AI (data, technology, tools) are less likely to derive value than those companies that actively align business owners, process owners, and AI owners. Leaders enable their organizations to consume AI as much as to produce AI."
Separately, the Economist article “Data-labelling startups want to help improve corporate AI” said,
“only one in five companies aware of the technology’s potential has incorporated machine learning into its core business.
"One reason for the slow uptake is the dearth of quality data to teach algorithms to perform useful tasks. The most common form of ai, called “supervised learning”, requires feeding software stacks of pre-tagged examples of, say, cat pictures until it can tell a feline image apart by itself.
"Data-labelling is the sort of grunt work that corporate ai-users would prefer someone else to do for them. An industry is popping up to help.”
OUR TAKE
The increase in “data-labelling startups” is a welcome addition to the AI landscape because many AI projects are challenged by 1) limited access to good data and 2) data not in an acceptable format for AI applications.
The most transformative/disruptive AI services will address specific/discrete tasks with better efficiency and endurance than humans.
AI adoption will become increasingly pervasive moving beyond “early adopters” industries such as financial services, tech, telecom and media and expanding into area such as healthcare, construction, agriculture and professional services.