Sheila Rohra, CEO, Hitachi Vantara.
Investment in AI has boomed in recent years, with various business segments dedicating billions and billions of dollars to exploring and implementing the technology. This movement has become so pervasive that spending on building up AI technologies represented 16% to 20% of the real gross domestic product growth in the third quarter of 2024 alone—and it’s expected to keep growing.
Generative AI’s democratization of AI has been a key driver fueling this movement. Author and researcher Joe McKendrick opines that the democratized innovation that GenAI has triggered is akin to crowdsourcing, which is based on “the idea that everyone has something to contribute.”
In light of this massive, rapidly advancing movement, now is the time for businesses to embrace the democratization of AI, unlock tangible benefits and unleash AI’s return on investment (ROI).
Here are three business strategies to get the greatest value from AI and advance your business:
1. Don’t jump too quickly—examine your best options to maximize ROI.
While AI investment is on the rise, not everybody understands it or how to apply it in their environments. That’s why AI projects haven’t always been successful, leading to production-level implementations, and why some people believe AI has been over-hyped.
But AI can offer real value.
To position your business to get maximum ROI out of your AI efforts, take the time to examine potential use cases and clearly identify your goals. Keep it simple, and don’t get distracted. Identify high-impact use cases that could best benefit from more process automation, better decision making and efficiency, and concentrate your resources on those opportunities.
Don’t premeditate what you have seen and heard in the past. Instead, look at and listen to what’s happening around you now and continuously reevaluate and retune your AI efforts. When it comes to getting maximum value from AI, you’re not always following a straight line.
Engage with a partner with experience in AI, deep expertise in your sector and a strong history of working with and learning from large enterprises and running its own businesses. Such partners are ideally positioned to help you understand where the best opportunities for improvement exist and implement the best technologies and approaches to maximize AI ROI.
2. Seek simplicity, address the silo challenge and be focused.
Make sure the conversations with your partner are two-way. This will help ensure that your partner of choice fully understands your goals and can then offer guidance on where you can get the most value from AI and the technology and approaches you’ll need to get there.
AI today requires significant effort and investment. To simplify the complex and position yourself for success, seek turnkey AI offerings that include storage, software, switching, computing and even solutions layered on top. Make sure those solutions are built for scale and sustainability.
Remember that data fuels AI, so data management is crucial to ensure the success of AI efforts. Many large organizations think they know what data they have, and some of them do. But data at large companies, which includes different groups and teams, exists in various separate silos. That can lead to dark data (i.e., data you don’t know exists or how to find).
Overcome that challenge by embracing compliance, data cataloging, e-discovery and governance solutions. That way, you can understand what data you have and where it exists so you can more easily access the data you need to support your AI efforts and achieve the best results.
Be very focused on what makes sense in terms of your use cases and the data infrastructure updates you need to make. Pick one or two case studies, investigate them well and then address only what you need to address from an infrastructure standpoint to support them.
Be aware that AI will eventually become so concise that businesses may be able to retrain models without the need for colossal machines. Instead of overengineering new solutions, businesses could reuse what already exists for their next-generation products and initiatives. That, in turn, will drive the democratization of AI even further. This may be hard to imagine. But who would’ve dreamed 20 years ago that we’d all have access to a tool like Siri at our fingertips?
3. Embed AI into core operations and democratize across your organization.
Starting with a well-researched, targeted approach to AI will enable you to gain more experience and demonstrate how AI can add value to your business. After you implement AI into one or two use cases, you can tackle one or two more and more after that. Over time, you’ll have the track record, expertise and confidence needed to embed AI into core operations.
Approach AI as integral to your workflows and products to ensure long-term value from the technology. I believe we will see mass democratization of AI in the next three to five years. At that point, people won’t talk much about AI because it will be integral to everything we do.
Organizations adopting these three strategies can move forward confidently to embed AI into their operations—first, for select use cases and later across their core operations and enterprises, avoiding common pitfalls to maximize ROI for meaningful business outcomes.
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