Why Business Leaders Can’t Afford to Miss Out on Investing in Artificial Intelligence
Without a doubt, artificial intelligence (AI) is causing disruption to every industry, company, and geography, and its impacts will be greater than those generated by the internet. Every company has its opportunity to adopt AI in order to increase revenues and decrease costs. But, this is not a time of choice. Like the internet, AI is an imperative. A time will come — perhaps by 2030 or perhaps sooner — when every company will see AI spread across their entire organization. Those companies that are not planning for their transformation put themselves at an existential risk.
Gartner projects that by 2021, AI will create $2.9 trillion in business value and generate 6.2 billion hours in worker productivity. In light of these assumptions, it’s no wonder that PwC forecasts that AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
Though AI presents tremendous opportunity to businesses, companies will not accrue these benefits without effort. Executive teams must face AI with deliberate intent, realizing that in the race to gain competitive advantage from the technology, there will be winners and losers. In Notes from the AI frontier: Modeling the impact of AI on the world economy, experts from McKinsey & Company suggest that by 2030, AI technologies could lead to a substantial performance gap between AI front-runners (who fully absorb AI tools across their enterprises) and non-adopters or partial adopters. They quantify the rewards flowing to front-runners as a potential doubling of cash flow by 2020, implying annual net cash-flow growth of about six percent for the next decade-plus. This growth is at the expense of non-adopters who “might experience around a 20 percent decline in their cash flow from today’s levels.”
So, what can companies do today to ensure they develop a winning AI strategy? Here, a look into the challenges AI presents and how organizations can navigate these challenges to come out on top.
Right now, companies face multiple obstacles when it comes to capitalizing on the enormous growth opportunities AI presents.
For starters, there’s a tremendous shortage of data scientists today, and this will remain the case for years ahead.
