According to a new report from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, 11% of global executives have seen significant financial benefits from their AI initiatives.
Based on a survey of 2,197 managers from 106 countries , the report says that using AI can produce cultural and financial business benefits that build off of each other. AI helps companies reassess their effectiveness.
More than 75% of managers who reported that their artificial intelligence implementations improved their team’s decision-making and efficiency also saw improvements in collective learning (87%), team morale (79%), and collaboration (78%), says the report.
In its fifth consecutive year, this longitudinal examination of cross-industry AI adoption identifies a wide range of AI-related cultural benefits at both the team and organizational levels.
Key study findings include:
- AI-related cultural and financial benefits build off of each other. Using AI helps companies reassess what being effective means in their organizations. This leads to new business objectives, which leads to new ways to measure performance, new behaviors, and improved outcomes.
- Survey respondents who see significant financial benefits with their AI initiatives are 10 times more likely to change how they measure success as a result of using AI than those who saw no such benefits.
- Sixty-four percent of companies that use AI extensively or in some parts of their processes change how they measure performance and adjust their key performance indicators (KPIs).
- When AI enables workers to outperform existing KPIs, new success measures are necessary. Sixty-six percent of respondents who agree that their KPIs have changed because of AI also see improvements in team-level collaboration.
Of companies using AI to explore new ways to create value (versus improve existing processes), 59% agree that using AI helps them defend against competitors and capture opportunities from adjacent industries. These companies are also 2.7 times more likely to agree that AI is helping their company capture opportunities in adjacent industries.
“Most companies still have a long way to go to generate substantial financial benefits with AI,” says Sam Ransbotham, a professor in the information system department at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, an MIT SMR guest editor, and a report coauthor. “Those who do obtain significant financial benefits often have learned how to culturally benefit from AI and how to use AI to glean financial rewards. Our research suggests that these are connected, not separate, activities.”