Today, the volume and velocity of data generated at every point in an organization’s value chain results in a tidal wave of information that humans simply cannot process and analyze. Yet, these data are vital in making the right business decisions at the right time—often in real time. Companies still operating with traditional technology infrastructure and processes are simply ill-equipped to cope with today’s 24/7, always-on global marketplace. To remain viable, companies must digitally transform. That’s where enterprise A.I. comes in.
This sophisticated technology uses machine-learning models—algorithms—to process reams of information and generate recommendations that can identify, resolve, and streamline a company’s most complex business issues. Issues such as supply chain optimization, inventory management, anti-money laundering, aircraft maintenance, and hundreds of other complex use cases. And that makes the next evolution in A.I.—enterprise A.I.—an imperative for any company that needs to derive maximum value from its data and avoid being disrupted and relegated to the dustbin of history.
For digital transformation to succeed, according to a recent article in McKinsey Quarterly, leadership from the top is imperative. That means that CEOs play the most important role in this substantial and challenging project. Ultimately, its success lies with them.
Why CEOs must lead the charge for enterprise A.I.
What it takes to ensure companies survive and thrive in the 21st century.
—Name Title, Company
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leadership from the top is imperative.
For digital transformation to succeed,
Understand the technology and how it will help the business
Due to its holistic impact across the organization, a digital transformation process and the enterprise A.I. platform that enables it must be understood and prioritized by the CEO and the entire C-suite team. “Digital transformation is about sweeping change,” says Tom Siebel, founder, chairman, and CEO of C3.ai, a company that develops and deploys enterprise A.I. for some of the largest organizations in the world. “It changes everything about how products are designed, manufactured, sold, delivered, and serviced—and it forces CEOs to rethink how companies execute, with new business processes, management practices, and information systems.”
Before embarking on a digital transformation journey, the CEO needs to establish a solid digital leadership structure. Leading global organizations, such as multinational energy provider ENGIE, have created the role of the chief digital officer (CDO), who maintains authority and responsibility for enabling transformation across the entire enterprise. The CDO, defined by McKinsey as someone who is “charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses,” oversees the implementation of an enterprise A.I. platform and ensures that the right use cases are identified, the right information is collected and analyzed, and business-critical value is achieved and recognized.
Begin with high-value use cases
Implementing an enterprise A.I platform is an undertaking that has broad implications across an organization. Due to the scale of impact, it is essential to start with the right use cases. CEOs should ask themselves: What are the business’s process pain points, and how can enterprise A.I. address them? How can enterprise A.I. identify cost savings? How can it streamline maintenance or predict and prevent oncoming problems? And finally: What is the total value the company could realize if these issues are successfully addressed?
It is likely that most businesses have a number of issues that enterprise A.I. can address, many of which are interconnected. This is where enterprise A.I. shines. By creating a digital transformation road map that outlines these objectives, CEOs can make effective and strategic decisions about how and where to deploy enterprise A.I., and in turn, identify the right technology partners to support those decisions.
—Tom Siebel Founder, Chairman, & CEO, C3.ai
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sweeping change.”
“Digital transformation is about
Assemble the right team
Deploy enterprise A.I.
Enterprise A.I. is orders of magnitude more complex than an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or a customer relationship management (CRM) system; while many companies have tried to build it themselves, they quickly “fold up their tents,” according to Siebel. To streamline implementation and accelerate time to value, organizations often choose to buy the technology from a company like C3.ai, which has spent a decade developing the C3 AI Suite, a robust and proven platform currently processing trillions of rows of data and generating more than 1 billion predictions per day across multiple industries. The work C3.ai has done with numerous Fortune 1,000 clients has allowed the company to continually hone the C3 AI Suite to meet evolving customer needs while also providing prebuilt predictive applications to address industry-specific challenges. Tapping into proven expertise saves time and money, and allows for faster deployment across the enterprise.
Enterprise A.I. goes well beyond one use case, says Houman Behzadi, president and chief product officer at C3.ai, and it’s critical to put everything on the table. The areas where enterprise A.I. can deliver value are vast, including optimizing equipment maintenance, detecting fraud, predicting customer churn, evaluating staff satisfaction, strengthening cybersecurity, and much more. “A company might build one use case, but enterprise A.I. is about addressing your entire value chain,” Behzadi says. “You can repurpose applications you’ve already built, continually increasing their areas of impact.”
The time for CEOs to embrace enterprise A.I. and prepare their organizations to thrive in the future is now. “We’re dealing with a mass extinction event in the corporate world. This issue of digital transformation has risen to the top of the [CEO] agenda,” says Siebel. “He or she is pounding on the table, mandating this thing called digital transformation.”
Scale
Enterprise A.I. is a new category of software that connects every function of a business and applies the power of artificial intelligence from equipment maintenance and the supply chain to finance and human resources. An enterprise A.I. platform leverages elastic cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of things to enable digital transformation across an organization. An effective enterprise A.I. platform enables data scientists, who are intimate with algorithms, and business analysts, who are intimate with the business, to collaborate: It allows them to utilize information from all areas of the organization, not just a few silos they may be familiar with, to develop machine-learning models that deliver meaningful business insights.
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Incorporate enterprise A.I. now or risk getting disrupted
The enterprise A.I. imperative: Tom Siebel talks to Alan Murray
Your company must harness the power of enterprise A.I.
Why CEOs must lead the charge for enterprise A.I.
Why every industry needs enterprise A.I.—yesterday
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A critical decision, and one that has defined many CEOs, is the decision to either build an enterprise A.I. platform internally or to work with a technology partner on a prebuilt platform. Companies that have attempted the do-it-yourself approach inevitably fail, Siebel notes, becoming bogged down in a Gordian knot of disparate components that were not designed to work together.
Enterprise A.I.
Enterprise A.I.
succeed, leadership from the top
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BACK TO HOME
Incorporate enterprise A.I. now or risk getting disrupted
Your company needs to harness the power of enterprise A.I.
Why CEOs must lead the charge for enterprise A.I.
Why every industry needs enterprise A.I.—yesterday
The enterprise A.I. imperative: Tom Siebel talks to Alan Murray
EXPLORE MORE