AI won't transform your business unless you transform it first

Detailed summary

Organisations need to overhaul their processes to truly reap the benefits of artificial intelligence, according to experts. Bolting the technology to existing systems will not…

Organisations need to overhaul their processes to truly reap the benefits of artificial intelligence, according to experts.

Bolting the technology to existing systems will not bring about the drastic changes that AI providers are touting.

“It's a huge change and that's why the dynamic is not going to be as fast as people imagine,” said Denis Torii, vice president analyst at Gartner.

“It's not an IT story for sure. It's not [the case of] only the business stakeholders who are pushing us to adopt more AI,” he said. "It's actually an organisational story, where the organisation needs to adapt to it."

“Right now [organisations] are doing the same stuff but with AI in the middle, and that probably is not going to bring that transformation that people are expecting,” he told The National on the sidelines of the recent Oracle AI World event in Las Vegas.

Currently, organisations are using AI across the enterprise with a range of tools – from chatbots and software coding agents to agentic systems capable of acting autonomously across workflows, a McKinsey report in August found.

However, enterprise-level financial impact remains limited. Only 37 per cent of respondents reported an AI contribution to their organisations' earnings before interest and tax (Ebit), unchanged from a year earlier, McKinsey's Global Survey on the State of AI found.

To benefit from AI requires a shift in leadership mindset, according to Gabby Fredkin, head of analytics and insights at Adapt, a specialist IT research advisory.

A fundamental change is needed to go from “we're just going to layer technology on, to we're actually going to think about the ethos of our organisation, what we do, the type of roles that we have”, he said.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The National. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.