Nowe Technologie Archive

BCG Executive Perspectives – Artificial Intelligence: Ready to Ride the Wave?

Posted in: Artykuły, Felietony, Informatyka w Firmie, Nowe Technologie, Opinie, Prawo

There’s a reason AI has risen to the top of many executives’ agendas. It’s difficult to overstate the ways the technology has already changed the world—and this is just the beginning. AI is leading a global shift in human activity away from routine labor and toward creative endeavors, enhancing productivity, sharpening analytics capabilities, and vastly improving the consumer experience.

And according to a BCG-MIT SMR survey, 84% of respondents believe that harnessing AI is increasingly becoming a key source of competitive advantage, while 75% say that AI has allowed them to move into new business areas. But given its ever-expanding application, AI may soon be more than just a way to gain a competitive edge. It could become essential to survival. The pressure is on.

Leaders looking to improve their organizations’ AI capabilities should start by understanding the following trends and considering what they mean in the marketplace today.

At this point, AI is by no means a niche area of investment or capability. Since the advent of the pandemic, more than half of all companies have accelerated their adoption of the technology, which is also gaining increasing attention from VC investors. A closer look at spending suggests that businesses are particularly focused on AI’s potential in four areas: optimization, personalization, automation, and predictive maintenance. Collectively, these capabilities can be used to improve the consumer experience—via self-driving cars, smart homes, new therapeutics, curated content offerings, and more. They are also revolutionizing industries. Customer forecasting, cybersecurity, and diagnostic abilities are just a few of the many applications constantly making progress thanks to AI.

Despite these advancements—as well as the technology’s hidden cultural benefits and positive effects on employees—very few companies are reaping the corresponding financial rewards. Discovery and implementation are important early steps in effective AI usage, but many organizations stop there. Firms that see the greatest returns from their investments reimagine processes across the enterprise while putting a premium on learning between humans and machines. Successful businesses recognize that harnessing the full power of AI is ultimately a strategic, not technological, endeavor.

In fact, many of the prevailing obstacles to effective AI use aren’t related to technology. A lack of data capabilities poses a critical challenge, but labor market dynamics and broader societal issues are concerns as well.

It’s up to leaders to address these challenges while identifying the best path forward for their organizations. Harnessing the full power of AI is no easy task, but it’s an essential one for surviving and thriving now and in the years ahead. The following actions—though not exhaustive—are key elements of an executive playbook for strengthening AI capabilities.

More: BCG Download our full analysis

BCG Most Innovative Companies 2021

Posted in: Anti-equilibrium, Innovation, Makroekonomia, Nowe Technologie, Zarządzanie Firmą

Coming out of COVID-19, companies want—and need—to innovate. But too few are ready to rise to the challenge.

Successful innovation takes three things. Making innovation a priority. Committing investment and talent to it. And being ready to transform investment into results. So how are the most innovative companies doing?

Innovation priority is up.

Let’s start with the good news. The number of companies reporting that innovation is among their organizations’ top three priorities is up 10 percentage points in 2021 to 75%—the largest year-over-year increase in the 15 global innovation surveys BCG has conducted since 2005.

But only about half of companies are investing behind their aspirations.

Priorities are good, but commitment counts, too. And just under half of the companies in our research report are putting real resources behind their priorities. We call these companies committed innovators.

An organization can create real value only if its underlying innovation system is ready to translate priority and commitment into results. On this dimension, the news is sobering.

Many committed innovators face a big readiness gap.

This year, we asked respondents a series of questions that enabled us to use BCG’s innovation-to-impact benchmarking framework (i2i by BCG) to assess the readiness of their innovation systems. A perfect i2i score is 100—and only about a quarter of committed innovators scored 80 or above. The median committed innovator fell short of best practice on every i2i dimension, sometimes significantly. And by definition, if that’s how the median performer fared, half of committed innovators score even lower. You can explore the dimensions of the readiness gap below and in the first chapter of our Most Innovative Companies 2021 report: “The Readiness Gap.”

Our analysis reveals that focusing on deficits in five of the ten i2i readiness areas are likely to have the greatest returns:

A focus on leadership and teaming can help close the readiness gap.

The five key elements of readiness highlighted above can be distilled into two overarching themes—leadership and teaming—each of which is the subject of a chapter of this year’s full Most Innovative Companies report.

Leadership.

Leading innovators drive results from a clear CEO agenda. And unambiguous C-level ownership distinguishes top performers from underperformers as measured by share of sales from new products and services. What should be on the CEO’s innovation agenda? We examine this question specifically in “The CEO Innovation Agenda,” the second chapter of this year’s report.

Teaming.

It’s also impossible to achieve innovation readiness without a strong link—indeed, a virtuous cycle of collaboration—between product development and facing functions. Establishing this cycle and keeping it active are perennial challenges. In fact, this year the global innovation executives we surveyed cited it as the top obstacle to achieving higher returns on innovation investment. Explore the stories of ten leading innovators that successfully maintain innovation’s connection with the marketplace in the third chapter of our Most Innovative Companies report: “How Leaders Bring Product and Sales Teams Together.”

Download the full report

The future of air mobility: Electric aircraft and flying taxis

Posted in: Anti-equilibrium, Branże, Logistyka, Makroekonomia, Nowe Technologie

Look! Up in the sky! Not a bird … or a plane … it’s an eVTOL! An eVTOL (pronounced “ee-vee-tol”) is an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—and thousands of them could be flying above cities by 2030. Hear McKinsey experts and industry pioneers describe what’s coming in the world of “advanced air mobility” (AAM) and how it could affect passengers, pilots, and our planet.

By 2030, the leading companies in the passenger AAM industry could have bigger fleets—and offer many more flights per day—than the world’s largest airlines. Flights will be shorter, averaging only 18 minutes, with fewer passengers on board (between one and six, plus a pilot). That cadence—large numbers of aircraft flying frequent, short flights—will create operational challenges.

Flying taxis

More: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/the-next-normal/air-taxis

McKinsey Global Survey on AI 2021

Posted in: Anti-equilibrium, Branże, Informatyka w Firmie, Nowe Technologie, Opinie, Raport z Rynku

The results of our latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI indicate that AI adoption continues to grow and that the benefits remain significant— though in the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year, they were felt more strongly on the cost-savings front than the top line. As AI’s use in business becomes more common, the tools and best practices to make the most out of AI have also become more sophisticated.
We looked at the practices of the companies seeing the biggest earnings boost from AI and found that they are not only following more of both the core and advanced practices, including machine-learning operations (MLOps), that underpin success but also spending more efficiently on AI and taking more advantage of cloud technologies. Additionally, they are more likely than other organizations to engage in a range of activities to mitigate their AI-related risks—an area that continues to be a shortcoming for many companies’ AI efforts.

AI adoption and impact

A majority of survey respondents now say their organizations have adopted AI capabilities, as AI’s impact on both the bottom line and cost saved is growing.

Findings from the 2021 survey indicate that AI adoption is continuing its steady rise: 56 percent of all respondents report AI adoption in at least one function, up from 50 percent in 2020. The newest results suggest that AI adoption since last year has increased most at companies headquartered in emerging economies, which includes China, the Middle East and North Africa: 57 percent of respondents report adoption, up from 45 percent in 2020. And across regions, the adoption rate is highest at Indian companies, followed closely by those in Asia–Pacific. As we saw in the past two surveys, the business functions where AI adoption is most common are service operations, product and service development, and marketing and sales, though the most popular use cases span a range of functions. The top three use cases are service-operations optimization, AI-based enhancement of products, and contact-center automation, with the biggest percentage-point increase in the use of AI being in companies’ marketing-budget allocation and spending effectiveness.

Finally, respondents say AI’s prospects remain strong. Nearly two-thirds say their companies’ investments in AI will continue to increase over the next three years, similar to the results from the 2020 survey.

More info: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics