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2. Creating value with AI
Creating value with AI requires a culture of innovation and learning. Participants discussed the importance of empowering innovators to fail fast, and employees to use AI safely with guardrails.
Data and behavior are key AI value drivers. May Lam, Chief Information Officer at Australian Payment Plus, says “Data is still the goldmine… and behavior of the data… is now the new oil.” Participants discussed the importance of data readiness, including ensuring cleanliness and data governance. Data cleanliness helps ensure that models are trained on accurate data, which improves the accuracy and fidelity of outputs. Data governance helps mitigate risks such as bias, privacy violations and regulatory non-compliance.
But organizations also face increasing scrutiny around the cost and ROI of AI investments — particularly amid high implementation costs and an inflationary climate — making it critical to identify the use cases that will drive the biggest value pools and outcomes. From use cases, organizations can move to trials to demonstrate proof-of-concept, and then into production and scaling up.
AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape organizational operating and business models. Participants discussed using AI to drive organizational transformation, which then leads to business transformation. While most will start with use cases that make existing business processes more efficient and productive, the bigger opportunity is to rethink business processes, functions and models from the ground up, and optimize them in an AI-first way.
Ultimately, AI will create value by reshaping talent and work across the organization. Homaira Akbari and David Wright pointed out that 60% of today’s job titles did not exist in 1940, and that AI will similarly reshape work and redistribute the workforce.