A Guide for CEOs to Accelerate AI Excitement and Adoption

This guide provides CEOs and senior executives with an actionable framework for AI transformation. It is comprehensive, easy to digest and rooted in lessons learned from our 10-plus years of applied AI R&D and the ongoing experimentation occurring in our AI Proving Ground, the best-of-breed AI lab environment inside our Advanced Technology Center (ATC).

As you pursue AI transformation, it's useful to hold several thoughts in mind:

1. Business value is your North Star: CEOs should view AI as a strategic investment rather than a mere technological upgrade. AI has the potential to unlock new business models, enhance customer experiences, and drive operational efficiencies, leading to improved margins and growth. Ultimately, the ROI of your AI investments will be realized through their ability to drive significant business outcomes and maintain a competitive edge in the market.
2. AI is not a single technology or a one-size-fits-all solution. AI is a broad concept that includes traditional AI and GenAI, both of which play crucial roles in modern AI transformation and are very different from each other. Importantly, GenAI should be thought of as a unique general-purpose technology that should be treated like a product — one that requires strategic and ongoing planning, governance, execution, buy-in, collaboration and continual learning across the organization to operationalize, scale and maintain.
3. AI transformation requires overcoming resistance. Every AI adoption journey involves navigating different forms of resistance, whether organizational, technical, ethical or cultural. Understanding, empathizing with and addressing these pockets in an honest and transparent manner can help CEOs better implement effective strategies to promote the shared process evolution needed to drive excitement and buy-in while maximizing AI's value to the business.
4. AI is more complex than you think. AI is complicated for many reasons: the landscape's rapid pace of change and oft-conflated terminology; the extensive data requirements and proprietary algorithms; concerns about escalating compute, power and cooling requirements; persisting integration, scalability and maintenance challenges; talent acquisition hurdles; the murky and/or patchwork array of ethical and regulatory mandates; the need for continuous learning; the inherent risks associated with embracing a powerful yet poorly understood operational playbook, etc.
5. Data is foundational to AI success. Many organizations start their AI journey only for progress to quickly stall. A prime reason is poor data quality. To avoid this fate, smart organizations focus on modernizing their data foundations (governance, data pipelines, data exchanges, etc.) and reinforcing their ability to customize GenAI models by applying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to trusted data sets. We are seeing strong growth in this area, and we encourage continued investment in establishing and optimizing your AI and data foundations.
6. GenAI is not a luxury. As a breakthrough general-purpose technology, GenAI will soon be a necessity. If your business is not actively exploring potential GenAI use cases and mapping out a plan to move beyond the initial readiness and proof-of-concept stage, you're likely falling behind the competition. Don't let the fear of a misstep prevent you from committing to AI transformation. Mistakes will happen. Acknowledge them, learn from them and keep making incremental progress toward your goals.
7. AI success is more than digital transformation. It requires "organizational transformation" — a cultural shift in intelligence from siloed pockets of AI expertise to a collective mindset that accelerates and streamlines the development of intellectual property. Those able to execute AI transformation will discover strategic value in new customer experiences, employee knowledge sharing and productivity gains, and a newfound ability to remove operating frictions in ways that spur growth and improve margins.

Understanding these themes can help executives formulate a strategic vision of AI that attracts the kind of high-performance, product-minded talent needed to propel their businesses into the future. As you dig in, keep in mind that factors such as industry, organization size, IT infrastructure, data maturity, access to AI expertise and much more will determine the right approach for your organization.