Rethink AI in 2018 or risk failing
0Rethink AI in 2018 -- or risk failing.
Look right, look left, you'll see a fellow CIO contemplating their AI move. Failing to act is not an option in most organizations. However, as enterprises are kicking off their AI pilots or seeing early results, the honeymoon is over as enterprises that naively celebrated the cure-all promises of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is over. Enterprises needed better data foundations. They underestimated the level of business expertise needed. They didn't anticipate the resources it takes. And enterprises needed to rethink their business models. The truth is, AI is hard!
Forrester predicts that 2018 will be the year when a majority of enterprises start dealing with the hard facts: AI and all other new technologies like big data and cloud computing still require hard work. Our 2017 predictions for data and analytics pointed to AI as the spark to the insights revolution. This came true: Survey respondents who told us their firm was investing in AI rose from 40 percent in 2016 to 51 percent in 2017. But success isn't easy -- 55 percent of firms have not yet achieved any tangible business outcomes from AI, and 43 percent say it's too soon to tell.
The wrinkle? AI is not a plug-and-play proposition. Unless firms plan, deploy, and govern it correctly, new AI tech will provide meager benefits at best or, at worst, result in unexpected and undesired outcomes. If CIOs and chief data officers (CDOs) are serious about becoming insights driven, 2018 is the year they must realize that simplistic lift-and-shift approaches will only scratch the surface of possibilities that new tech offers.