#ReadThis @HarvardBiz @tdav @nmittalanalytic @DeloitteUS ALL-IN ON AI How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence by Tom Davenport and Nitin Mittal
It's not who you know, it's Whom You Know and since we don't know it all, we know Harvard Business Review Press. They mostly know it all, because they are Harvard. And when they don't, they call on experts in the field to educate the world through their brilliant press. The highly esteemed Ray Dalio states that one of the most overarching principles is “knowing how to deal well with what you don’t know is much more important than anything you know.” Not too many know a lot about AI, but we all should know more about it and consider the great effect it will have in our lives with its inevitable rise.
All in on AI is a groundbreaking essential work to every business owner today, no matter what the nature of your business. It is the wave of the future, and knowing how it works is part of the competitive business nature of today. We know we don't know AI but we know this is the tool to use! Though high-level concepts are illustrated and delved into with great panache, this work is accessible to everyone and pays forward the knowledge already captured. Humans, machines and data all interact with intersections you may not yet be aware of and will find most interesting to learn.
Particularly if you are not a recent graduate, the concept of Artificial Intelligence was nowhere near a textbook when you were in school. Everything is explained well such as the table to kick it all off showing the Type of AI technology and How It Works. Seriously, who knew? We see no virtual hands raised. We particularly like the human side and how real people are affected and how they can perform at their most competitive selves to take advantage of this newfound knowledge. We cover a lot of consumer behavior and this addresses that field profoundly.
Everything contained is well-ordered sequentially and thought out in an orderly fashion thus making it easier to understand. If it still all seems too mumbo-jumbo to you, consider Chapter Six where Industry Use Cases are clearly spelled out. It's thought-provoking to say the least and the domino effects of AI are probably not even close to being realized yet.
Best part of all? There are no finals. No exam takes place...Just your life, and your business which are both even more important!
Win Big and Be Smart with Harvard Business Review's Cutting Edge Information on What to Know Now about Artificial Intelligence, Highly Recommended by Whom You Know!
https://store.hbr.org/product/all-in-on-ai-how-smart-companies-win-big-with-artificial-intelligence/10599
Most companies are placing modest bets on artificial intelligence. Yet, the commonality among many of the highest performers and industry disruptors, regardless of sector, is an aggressive, all-in approach to AI integration. So why aren’t more companies joining this elite class of “AI-fueled” powerhouses, which account for less than 1% of large companies?
Now that they have a roadmap, they can. Combining the expertise of bestselling author and renowned thought leader, Tom Davenport, with the experience of a corporate AI leader, Nitin Mittal, the award-winning head of Deloitte Consulting’s Analytics and AI practice, ALL-IN ON AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press; January 24, 2023) shows how both tech and non-tech companies alike can turbocharge their performance with the power of AI.
Contrary to popular belief, widespread AI implementation is no longer simply a prerogative of the tech industry. Small to midsize companies and legacy businesses older than Silicon Valley can also benefit by fully integrating AI into their business practices and strategies. This book shows them how.
By analyzing case studies of companies they’ve worked with that have completely transformed through their AI integration - Ping An, Disney, Walmart, Capital One, Pfizer, Airbus, and more
- the authors offer a thorough explanation of what it means to be “fueled by AI,” from models for easy adoption to infrastructure for smooth execution. They argue against siloing AI to a few departments and call instead for an aggressive “all-in” approach throughout the entire organization.
With vivid examples and actionable insights, the authors explore how companies can:
Transform operations and differentiate themselves from competitors with the power of AI
Develop the kind of leadership and culture that is fundamental to AI-powered transformation
Pursue new business strategies, models, and ecosystems for innovation and growth enabled by AI
Establish ethical AI capabilities through transparency, fairness, reliability, privacy, safety, robustness, and more.
ALL-IN ON AI provides a path for any company to go all-in so they can combine artificial intelligence with human capabilities for unbeatable performance.
ALL-IN ON AI:
How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence
By Tom Davenport and Nitin Mittal
Harvard Business Review Press | On Sale January 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1647824693
For more information, visit:
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Visiting Professor at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte’s AI practice. He pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics” with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article (and his 2007 book by the same name). He has published over twenty books and over 300 articles for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and many other publications. He writes columns for Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting magazine, one of the top 3 business/technology analysts in the world by Optimize magazine, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry by Ziff-Davis magazines, and one of the world’s top fifty business school professors by Fortune magazine. He’s also been a LinkedIn Top Voice for both the education and tech sectors.
Nitin Mittal is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. He currently serves as the US Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategic Growth Offering Consulting Leader. He is the 2019 recipient of the AI Innovator of the Year award at the AI Summit New York. He specializes in advising clients to achieve competitive advantage through data and cognitive powered transformations that promote amplified intelligence and enable our clients to make strategic choices and transform ahead of disruption.
Throughout his career, Nitin has served as a trusted advisor on data, analytics and AI and has worked across a number of industry sectors. His primary focus has been working with Life Sciences and Health Care clients, implementing large scale data programs that promote organizational intelligence, and the use of advanced analytics and AI to drive insights and business strategy.
A Conversation with Tom Davenport & Nitin Mittal
Authors of All-In On AI
What does it mean for a business or organization to be “all-in on AI” or “AI-fueled?”
The companies that are going “all in” on AI are ones who are placing big and intelligent bets on AI and using AI technologies to radically transform their products, processes, strategies, customer relationships, and cultures. This elite group of world-class organizations represents less than one percent of large companies, yet all are high performers in their industries. Some of these firms are digital natives, but our focus in the book is on legacy firms that are transforming themselves with AI.
Why is taking an “all-in” approach to AI implementation more beneficial for businesses as opposed to a more gradual or conservative method?
Almost all organizations are placing at least modest bets on artificial intelligence. In fact, Deloitte’s most recent State of AI in the Enterprise report found that 94% of business leaders surveyed agree that AI is critical to success over the next five years. But many companies are just experimenting, and don’t receive much economic value from their AI projects. Those organizations that are all-in on AI are embracing the technology, making strategic investments and realizing successful outcomes. And they are reaping the benefits. We also found that these organizations have better business models, make better decisions, have better relationships with their customers, offer better products and services, and command higher prices. Not every company will choose this ambitious approach, but we believe that everyone can learn from it and be inspired by it.
For traditional, non-tech companies, what are the benefits of embracing AI? Which industries have you seen flourish with the use of AI?
The focus of our book is how large firms that existed well before AI are transforming themselves with the help of that technology. These companies span a wide range of industries, including banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, retailers and consumer products companies, information providers, life sciences companies, and government organizations. For these organizations, AI is not simply a transformational technology, it’s the next step in the augmentation of human cognition. AI can be used not just to increase efficiencies, but to gain a competitive advantage, shape new markets, and change human productivity and efficiency.
What are the most common ways companies use AI, and what are some of the more unconventional, or rarer, uses for AI in their businesses?
AI use cases vary widely by industry and Deloitte’s AI Dossier report offers examples of current and future use cases. However, some of the top use cases of AI across industries include personalization of marketing offers, pricing optimization; customer churn prediction, chatbots and conversational AI; predictive maintenance; and uptime/reliability optimization. Less common use cases can be found across industries as well, and include early warning systems for business disruptions, and aggressive support of product development processes.
Should employees be concerned about AI replacing them? How do you envision employees interacting with these fully integrated AI systems?
We’ve found many cases of AI augmenting human workers, but very few involving large-scale automation and replacement. In Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise report, 82% of respondents indicated that their employees believe that working with AI technologies will enhance their performance and job satisfaction. Many organizations have begun to realize the benefits of using AI to augment the workforce, rather than replace jobs and are taking action to support a human-machine collaboration strategy. One of the biggest opportunities organizations may have for driving greater value with AI is redesigning work itself.
What role does leadership play in widespread AI integration? How can they ensure its success?
Leadership is absolutely crucial. Becoming AI fueled requires vision, passion, and energy from a senior executive who has identified the market imperative for AI, and can act as an executive sponsor by mobilizing the necessary stakeholders, develop key assets, and cultivate strategic ecosystem relationships, to support the investment, the mission, and the journey. To be successful, an organization needs to commit to embracing AI as a vision from the top and embedding it throughout the entire business. This is demonstrated by the companies and specific leaders we profile in the book that model transformational success. Those leaders make it a point to understand the role of AI in their businesses, advocate strongly for it whenever possible, and help make key decisions about where to deploy it.
What does it mean for a company to be an “organizational learning machine?”
Today, few companies are obtaining significant financial benefits from AI technologies. However, the companies that are reaping the most benefits from AI are the ones that change processes to facilitate organizational learning with AI. They monitor multiple aspects of their business environment continuously, assess how well their AI models are predicting, and retrain them when necessary. This allows them to act precisely when sensing opportunity and to adapt quickly when conditions change. It’s worth noting that organizational learning with AI is not easy. It requires humans and machines to work together and learn from each other over time. Done well, it makes humans and machines smarter and more effective. But it can be difficult to achieve at scale.
Can you discuss how non-technical departments, such as human resources, are instrumental in helping companies transition towards becoming “AI-fueled”?
There are applications for AI across all non-technical departments--HR, finance, marketing and more. When these organizations embrace AI, the organization inherently becomes AI-fueled throughout. It’s important to note that becoming an AI-fueled organization is about more than technology. The most important attribute in AI success is not machinery, but human leadership, behavior, and change. An important element that has emerged in establishing positive working relationships with intelligent machines is to focus on fostering trust in algorithms by involving business specialists and frontline employees to help design them. By involving the users of the AI technologies in the design and development of those systems increases the chances that those users will successfully adopt and use the technology. And some business functions, like human resources, need to help employees upskill in order to work effectively alongside AI systems.
How can AI strategy influence customer behavior? What approaches have you seen implemented and how did it affect their business?
As a whole, AI-fueled organizations are reaping a variety of benefits from AI and one key benefit is better relationships with their customers. These organizations are rethinking all of their products and services and applying AI to better understand their customers and using that information to bring them the products and solutions they want and need. AI can also help predict customer needs and preferences and inform the products and services that organizations offer in the future. This can change the business model of the company, and help the company create the “next big thing” their customers will want and need. Embedding AI into products and services creates a dynamic experience for customers and enables them to deliver the assistance and information customers need, whenever, wherever, and however they want it.
What is an “AI-driven ecosystem”, and could you explain how it can transform a company?
One approach to ecosystems involves obtaining AI resources. No single company has all the needed talent, algorithms, data sets, or breadth of perspective in-house to innovate perpetually with AI. That’s largely why most of today’s AI-fueled organizations establish robust technology ecosystems: Through a diverse set of means, they build, partner, license, and access the elements needed to execute their strategy over the long term. The other key approach to ecosystems involves creating multi-sided platform business models that involve a variety of companies collaborating to serve customers and optimize key processes. We found several examples of these ecosystems that are powered by AI.
When employing AI at a large scale, how can you ensure that the systems being implemented are ethical and trustworthy? Why is this important?
Organizations that harness the power of AI while effectively governing its associated risks and implementing the right safeguards can better enable innovation, break boundaries, differentiate from the competition, and drive better outcomes. There are several dimensions for organizations to consider when designing, developing, deploying and operating AI systems in order to manage common risks and challenges related to AI ethics and governance. These include: fair and impartial use checks; implementing transparent and explainable AI; responsibility and accountability; putting proper security in place; monitoring for reliability; and safeguarding privacy. We describe not only how companies are creating policies in these areas, but also how they are putting them into practice.
How has AI been particularly transformative for Deloitte?
Deloitte is transforming itself from an exclusively people-oriented professional services firm to one enabled by smart humans working alongside smart machines, and it is one of the many case studies we present in the book. AI is one of the priority investments that Deloitte is making globally across all of its businesses. The AI strategic initiative has a five-year horizon, from 2021 to 2026. The plan specifies how each business can take advantage of AI, and then build a community; create go-to-market relationships with collaborators like Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and Google; build new practice areas; and invest for the long term. There is a joint focus on enabling internal capabilities and processes with AI, as well as creating new client offerings.
Some examples of the AI strategic initiative in action include:
The tax and audit businesses have collaborated on tools to pull client data together into a common format for analysis
The consulting business has created a set of AI services and professionals for clients called the “AI Foundry,” and some of them work with the audit and assurance practice
The creation of the AI Academy to upskill Deloitte employees in AI methods and tools. The Academy teaches about AI in the context of client business processes and strategies, and has become a creator of AI talent in the marketplace.
What should be understood by organizations who are skeptical about going all-in on AI?
Most organizations are placing modest bets on AI, taking a more gradual approach and achieving modest returns. However, by going all-in on AI organizations have the opportunity to radically transform their products, processes, strategies, customer relationships, and cultures.
Every organization will vary in its rationale, strategy, and specific path for aggressively integrating AI into its business. And the examples and lessons in the book will aid organizations in their individual journeys. The big takeaway, however, is that organizations that have been slow to adopt AI need to act now with urgency, or risk being left behind by the competition.
All-In on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big With Artificial Intelligence
New book by bestselling author Tom Davenport and head of Deloitte's AI business Nitin Mittal provides a guide for business leaders to transform their organizations by fully embracing artificial intelligence
Launching today, "All-In on AI" examines how extensive AI adoption offers a distinct competitive advantage to companies across a wide variety of industries. Widespread AI adoption is no longer merely the tech industry's prerogative; small to midsize companies and legacy businesses older than Silicon Valley can also benefit by integrating AI into their business strategies. "All-In on AI" delves into real examples of such companies that have transformed their business models, products, processes, strategies, cultures and more by fully embracing AI.
With less than 1% of large companies using AI extensively, the book uncovers and outlines the untapped potential of AI in a quickly accelerating digital world. It draws on the experience of its authors: Tom Davenport, a renowned author, academic, and specialist in business innovation, analytics, and artificial intelligence; and Nitin Mittal, the AI innovation award-winning leader of Deloitte's AI business, and principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. By analyzing case studies and working with companies that have seen widespread AI integration transform their business, the authors thoroughly illustrate what it means to be "AI fueled," from strategic archetypes for adoption to the human side, technology and data, capabilities, and industry use cases.
"All-In on AI" focuses on the transformative capabilities of aggressive AI adoption, rather than the experiments and narrow deployments that characterize most companies' approaches. The "all in" approach to AI can help companies differentiate themselves from the competition. The book also calls for an assumption of augmentation, in which artificial intelligence and human capabilities can interact in business. It lays out what leaders will need to take into consideration when applying AI broadly across a company's enterprises.
"At Deloitte, we determined that AI would play a major role in our organization's future, and we have invested in embedding AI across our audit, tax, consulting and risk advisory businesses. Our commitment to becoming AI fueled means that our professionals and AI systems work closely and collaboratively, augmenting each other," said Jason Girzadas, Deloitte's managing principal of businesses, global and strategic services. "'All-in on AI' provides a roadmap for any business leader committed to transforming their business through the power of AI."
"All-In on AI" will help readers learn:How companies with an "all-in" approach to artificial intelligence can transform their business models, operations and customer relationships and differentiate themselves from non-AI powered counterparts.
Why company leadership and culture are fundamental for a successful AI-powered transformation.
How AI can enable new business strategies, process designs and products/services for innovation and growth.
How case-study companies have sustainably achieved AI integration at a large scale.
How to develop ethical AI capabilities through transparency, fairness, reliability, privacy, safety, robustness and more.
Learn more about "All-In On AI" and purchase the book on the website.
About the authors
Tom Davenport is the president's distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, a visiting professor at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the digital economy, and a senior advisor to Deloitte's AI practice. He pioneered the concept of "competing on analytics" with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article (and his 2007 book by the same name). He has published over 20 books and over 300 articles for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and many other publications. He writes columns for Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been named one of the world's "Top 25 Consultants" by Consulting magazine, one of the top three business/technology analysts in the world by Optimize magazine, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry by Ziff-Davis magazines, and one of the world's top 50 business school professors by Fortune magazine. He's also been a LinkedIn Top Voice for both the education and tech sectors.
Nitin Mittal is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. He currently serves as the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) strategic growth offering leader. He is the 2019 recipient of the AI Innovator of the Year award at the AI Summit, New York. He specializes in advising clients to achieve competitive advantage through data and AI powered transformations that promote amplified intelligence and enable our clients to make strategic choices and transform ahead of disruption.
Throughout his career, Mittal has served as a trusted advisor on data, analytics and AI and has worked across a number of industry sectors. His primary focus has been working with life sciences and health care clients, implementing large scale data programs that promote organizational intelligence, and the use of advanced analytics and AI to drive insights and business strategy.
About Deloitte
Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500® and more than 7,000 private companies. Our people come together for the greater good and work across the industry sectors that drive and shape today's marketplace — delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthier society. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Building on more than 175 years of service, our network of member firms spans more than 150 countries and territories. Learn how Deloitte's approximately 415,000 people worldwide connect for impact at www.deloitte.com.
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