These days, there are a variety of stories about how AI will assist businesses. There are several applications in sales, marketing, payroll, and a variety of other sectors. However, there has been very little discussion about how organisations are progressing with their AI programmes this far. Are they delivering on their promises, and are there any actual examples of AI in the workplace that may be replicated elsewhere?
Most organizations are close to wrapping up the developmental and experimentation phases of their initial AI programs and are now looking to operationalize them within the business model. This is a crucial step for the technology because it represents the leap from expectation to reality. Without tangible results in the real world, such as heightened productivity, lower costs or some other positive outcome, AI could get pushed back to the lab for further refinement or possibly suffer a slow death altogether.
According to MIT Sloan Management Review, however, 2022 is shaping up to be the year that AI finally starts to produce solid returns on the investments of the past few years. In 2019, for example, only three out of 10 surveyed companies reported even minimal value from their AI endeavors, with failures largely attributed to the difficulty in pushing the technology into production environments. This year, more than 90% are reporting solid returns on their AI investments and are planning to expand their strategies going forward.
Marketing, in fact, seems to be the initial hotbed of activity for AI in production environments. Discite Analytics and AI recently posted five examples of how companies are using the technology to distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded and noisy business environment. Lays, for one, recently utilized deep fake technology to allow users to customize video messages of Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi to share among friends. Mattress firm Tomorrow Sleep put AI to work on their content marketing programs to identify ways to improve organic traffic and saw a jump from 4,000 visits per month to more than 400,000 per month within a year.
