Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation

Chapter 7Developing an AI Strategy

In the past, a lot of S&P 500 CEOs wished they had started thinking sooner than they did about their Internet strategy. I think five years from now there will be a number of S&P 500 CEOs that will wish they'd started thinking earlier about their AI strategy.

Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain, founder of Coursera, AI professor at Stanford

As Andrew Ng notes, there were many business leaders who did not take seriously the fact that Internet technology was one of the primary opportunities in their businesses. Today many businesses leave the decision of how, or even whether, to use AI solutions to their individual business units. Often little action is taken beyond developing proofs of concept. When action is taken, major problems can arise when these units do not collaborate on AI strategy, leaving the company with a host of incompatible or competing AI implementations. Not only can this cost both time and money, but the resulting lack of standards can undermine the ability to transform at scale.

Fortunately, many companies and their boards are now making AI-enabled digital transformation a high priority. This is important to do as early as possible, since it is easy to underestimate how long change takes as well as how many challenges there are when implementing an AI strategy. Just because there is a trend in the market to use AI does not mean that the steps an enterprise should take are obvious.

It is natural for executives to worry about ...