Driving Real World Value With AI

AI is becoming increasingly utilized in the workplace, and in an AI Office Hour with the Detroit Regional Chamber, Neveen Awad and Jonathan Nipper discuss what organizations championing AI integration are doing to drive real-world value. Awad is Managing Director and Senior Partner for the Detroit branch of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Nipper is Managing Director and Partner for the Detroit branch of BCG. These leaders explain how AI integration creates efficiency in the workplace and drives revenue when used strategically. 

Here are three key takeaways from the session:

Based on survey data, Awad and Nipper categorize the three Chief Executive Officer archetypes who use AI in the workplace as Followers, Pragmatists, and Trailblazers. They concluded that Trailblazers are the leaders who derive the most value from AI integration and achieve measurable growth in areas such as revenue, based on their financial investments, over time. 

“The leaders that are getting actual financial and cultural and organizational change that lasts, that leverages AI,” Awad said, “They’re saying, ‘where is there an opportunity to take a process end to end that requires a lot of time, a lot of challenge, a lot of people…and where does AI help us along that journey?’”

Generative AI is typically an organization’s introduction to new technology, but Awad and Nipper note that much more value can be found in simplified processes, more efficient task completion, and more with agents.  

“You’re looking at actual systems that respond to different environments and prompts and can actually execute tasks and not just the same rote task over and over, but tasks that require context and require, even at times, judgment,” Nipper said. “Even within Agentic AI, what we’re seeing is a move from single agents that are executing one task to groups of agents that are executing workflows and even across workflows starting to coordinate, that is really the kind of leading edge of where this is going.” 

The 10-20-70 split supports the idea that integrating AI into your organization’s systems isn’t about the algorithm or the technology, but it’s about the people and processes. 

“Having a prioritized view of which use cases for your company are going to actually move the needle, I think, is the number one thing…we’ve seen be a differentiator in terms of how clients are seeing value with AI,” Nipper said. “If you don’t have that view, it’s really hard for any of those thousand flowers blooming to take root and move beyond the pilot phase.”