AI needs to be more strategic: what does that even mean?

Strategic efforts in artificial intelligence will go much further than tactical operations. Okay, fine – but what makes an AI effort “strategic”?

The much-discussed 95% failure study on generative AI published by researchers at MIT found that these efforts lacked a strategic focus, writes noted AI and analytics guru Tom Davenport in a recent paper. “The key finding is that individual-level, tactical, comprehensive and superficial implementations of generative AI do not provide significant value to the companies that deploy them. On the other hand, enterprise-level generative AI projects that are consistent with a company’s business strategy often bring measurable value.”

Companies that succeed with AI, he adds, are those that see it as a transformative force, not just productivity boosts or fancy imagery.

So what exactly does it mean to pursue “strategic” approaches to AI? This is a source of confusion, said Sangeet Paul Choudary,…