A must-read HBR article!
Excerpt from the article:
Gen AI is certainly making companies more efficient. At a 2024 conference of chief information officers, executives from dozens of companies spoke about the ways in which the technology was reducing costs for their organizations.
Ally Financial’s CIO described how gen AI had lowered the cost of summarizing interactions between its service people and its customers; Cisco’s CIO related that gen AI was generating computer code in increasingly efficient ways; and the CIO at Dow outlined how his company was using it to reduce the costs of handling materials and evaluating whether a new product was patentable.
In February 2024 Klarna, a financial services company, reported that two-thirds of its customer-service chats had been handled by an AI-driven assistant in the program’s first month, with significant reductions in cost and increases in speed and no decline in customer satisfaction.
The trouble is that gen AI can deliver similar savings to any company that deploys it. Value is created but not captured—at least not for long.