Sizing the Prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalize?

Business leaders are asking: What impact will AI have on my organization, and is our business model threatened by AI disruption? And as these leaders look to capitalize on AI opportunities, they’re asking: Where should we target investment, and what kind of capabilities would enable us to perform better? Cutting across all these considerations is how to build AI in a responsible and transparent way needed to gain and maintain the trust and confidence of customers and wider stakeholders.

While some markets, sectors and individual businesses are more advanced than others, AI is still at a very early stage of development overall. From a macroeconomic point of view, there are therefore opportunities for emerging markets to leapfrog more developed counterparts. And within your business sector, one of today’s start-ups or a business that hasn’t even been founded yet could be the market leader in ten years’ time.

What comes through strongly from all the analysis we’ve done on the global impact of AI is just how big a game changer AI is likely to be, and how much value potential is up for grabs. AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined. Of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and $9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption side effects.

In our broad definition, AI is a collective term for computer systems that can sense their environment, think, learn, and take action in response to what they’re sensing and their overall goals and objectives.

Forms of AI in use today include, among others, digital assistants, chatbots, robotic process automation and machine learning. We like to look at uses of AI along two dimensions: (a) Is the AI system eliminating what humans do or are they working with humans to enhance what they do; (b) Is the AI system fixed in what it does or can it adapt and continuously learn from new circumstances. These two dimensions give us four distinct ways of analyzing impact of artificial intelligence in our lives:

•  Automated intelligence: Automation of manual/cognitive and routine/non-routine tasks.
• Assisted intelligence: Helping people to perform tasks faster and better.
• Augmented intelligence: Helping people to make better decisions.
• Autonomous intelligence: Automating decision making processes without human intervention.

The findings of our analysis are available here. In addition to gauging the economic potential for AI between now and 2030, we examined the impact of AI on regional economies and eight commercial sectors worldwide. Through our AI Impact Index, we also look at how improvements to personalization/ customization, quality and functionality could boost value, choice and demand across nearly 300 use cases of AI, along with how quickly transformation and disruption are likely to take hold. Other key elements of the research include in-depth sector-by-sector analyses.