HBR Guide to AI Basics for Managers

CHAPTER 22

How to Scale AI in Your Organization

by Manasi Vartak

AI is most valuable when it is operationalized at scale. For business leaders who wish to maximize business value using AI, scale refers to how deeply and widely AI is integrated into an organization’s core product or service and business processes.

Unfortunately, scaling AI in this sense isn’t easy. Getting one or two AI models into production is very different from running an entire enterprise or product on AI. And as AI is scaled, problems can (and often do) scale, too. For example, one financial company lost $20,000 in 10 minutes because one of its machine learning models began to misbehave. With no visibility into the root issue—and no way to even identify which of its models ...