The most important question is not where to deploy AI. What outcomes are most important to your business and whether AI can help drive your business forward?
That means basing all AI efforts on clear priorities. These include increasing revenue per salesperson, improving customer retention, accelerating product development, and reducing risk. In some cases, cost is important. Often that’s not the main factor.
Organizations that focus too much on tools often have partial activity with little impact on the business. Some leaders describe this as “pilot purgatory.” In contrast, companies that make real progress start somewhere else. They first define the outcome and then work backwards to the point where AI can make a meaningful difference.
We see this in every industry. Some teams are using AI to move from reactive audits to proactive risk identification. Some companies focus on finding system vulnerabilities early, before they become widespread. Even in areas like sales, teams are rethinking how they prepare for customer conversations, and engineering groups are designing products in anticipation of customer needs rather than responding to them. We are starting to call this AI “capability addition.” It is the ability to create new strategic value from work processes in addition to the optimization of efficiency, speed and quality related to the results of the original process.
