How much benefit will companies gain from transitioning to artificial intelligence-enabled business solutions? It’s a hard number to quantify, since AI solutions can be so different from one another, and a lot depends on how employees use them. Some of the benefits aren’t immediately tangible – measuring customer satisfaction, for example, is notoriously difficult.
Aera Technology recently commissioned IDC to prepare a white paper titled, “What Every Executive Needs to Know About AI-Powered Decision Intelligence.” The white paper is based on a global survey of Fortune 1000 companies that were asked about decision velocity and AI-enabled decision making as key factors in value generation. The study found that 75 percent of executive, VP and director-level respondents expect to gain significant or very significant improvements if investments in decision intelligence initiatives are made. The IDC research also revealed decision intelligence drove up to 20 percent improvement across product and service innovation, employee productivity, customer and employee retention, and more, since last fiscal year.
In the white paper, IDC examines how enterprise decisions are made and the challenges and opportunities involved in achieving better decision making. The research identifies common characteristics of enterprises with decision velocity — defined by IDC as the speed at which a decision-making process can be executed within a set of enterprise controls — and the connection to business value and competitive differentiation.
“While today’s headlines speculate about potential benefits and the future of AI, our research indicates that leading organizations are using AI, analytics, and data to generate value for their customers, employees, partners, investors, and communities,” said Dan Vesset, Group Vice President of Analytics and Information Management at IDC. “What unites these organizations are clear goals and KPIs to measure them, investments to accelerate decision velocity, and pragmatic use of enabling AI, analytics and data technologies and skills.”
Citing key factors contributing to decision-making challenges — including the number of variables to consider when making decisions, lack of access to the required data, difficulties integrating the necessary technology, and more — IDC revealed that one third (33 percent) of decisions are made primarily based on intuition and experience and 25 percent of decisions that should be made are not. There was also a disconnect found between executives’ understanding of lower-level, in-the-field decision making practices of employees — respondents sharing that only 55 percent of executives mostly, or fully, know how these decisions are made.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
