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Highlights
- Martec’s Law states that technology often changes at a faster pace than businesses can manage. As a result, this has a downstream exponential effect on people, institutions, and organizations.
- To understand the recent exponential phase of AI better, we spoke to CEOs, line-of-business leaders, and other senior executives with P&L responsibilities about how they are approaching the strategic implications of AI.
- The survey results displayed a classic illustration of Martec’s Law: enterprises everywhere want to deploy GenAI, but then discover that while it is relatively easy to do technology proofs of concept and pilots, scaling them into production is much more challenging.
- Businesses don’t quite have a handle on which KPIs to use to measure the success of AI deployments.
Catching up with technology
AI has gone through an exponential phase in the year since ChatGPT took the consumer world by storm and culture is still trying to catch up. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen with technology, though. When you step into a cinema in India to watch a movie, chances are high that someone’s mobile phone will ring. Chances are equally high that the guilty party will proceed to answer the phone and loudly let the caller know that they are watching a movie and do not wish to be disturbed, while actively disturbing everyone else in the vicinity.
This is a classic demonstration of Martec’s Law, which states that technology often changes at a faster pace than businesses can manage it. As a result, this has a downstream exponential effect on people, institutions, and organizations. In the US and Europe, mobile phone adoption happened gradually, as those countries augmented—as opposed to entirely replaced—landline telephones over time. On the other hand, mobile phones went through a rapid adoption curve in India, where the peak landline penetration never really crossed 2% of the population, and the vast majority of people leapfrogged from having no telephone to having a 4G-powered smartphone. So, when someone’s phone rings in the cinema and they answer it, they aren’t trying to be rude. Culture is merely still trying to catch up with technology.
TCS launches AI for Business study
To understand the recent exponential phase of AI better, we spoke to CEOs, line-of-business leaders, and other senior executives with P&L responsibilities about how they are approaching the strategic implications of AI. The TCS Thought Leadership Institute conducted a survey of nearly 1,300 CEOs and other senior executives of large, global enterprises active in 12 major industries across 24 countries.
We wanted to find out how senior decision-makers are responding to AI’s transformative potential beyond just rolling out the cool shiny new toy in town; that is, generative AI (GenAI) powered by large language models (LLMs). The study explored the impact of more established forms of AI (such as predictive analytics, machine learning, and automation) combined with GenAI. We did it this way because we believe the value of AI in the future will entail a combination of these capabilities.
AI: high on impact, low on KPIs
While more than half the survey participants believe that AI’s eventual impact will be even greater than the internet or smartphones, nearly 72% of them still believe they don’t quite have a handle on which KPIs will measure the success of AI implementations. Once again, this is a classic illustration of Martec’s Law, this time showing the symptom of an early-stage divergence curve. Everyone wants to implement GenAI, but then discovers that while it’s easy to do technology proofs of concept and pilots, it’s hard to scale these implementations to production.
The reasons are manifold. The technology is fundamentally probabilistic, while companies generally prefer to be more deterministic. Customer-facing GenAI chatbots are, for instance, being rolled out with great reluctance and lots of leashes to reduce the risk of the models going haywire and causing reputational harm.
Yet our study shows that for the marketing function, the interest in exploring the use of chatbots to improve customer engagement in marketing initiatives and for post-sales support is fairly high.
- 45% of executives are interested in creating more personalized interactions/engagements with their marketing initiatives
- 44% of executives are interested in creating more personalized interactions/engagements for post-sales support activities
Another intriguing finding: 65% of executives still believe human creativity or strategic thinking will remain essential to their competitive advantage, another classic sign of early-stage Martec’s Law thinking. The divergence between culture and the hockey-stick growth of AI is still perceptible and manageable. For now. Therein lies the fundamental challenge for companies when navigating the AI era.
We absolutely expect AI models to get significantly better at creativity, strategic thinking, and planning in the very near future. In another six months, it won’t be surprising to find executives changing their positions on the human-AI capability spectrum. However, this doesn’t mean humans will become nonessential. In fact, while seemingly superhuman technology can be intimidating, it can empower humans to be better. A Time magazine article titled ‘AI could help free human creativity’ sums it up nicely:
“AI will not necessarily come up with our best ideas for us. But it will greatly reduce the cost—in time, money, and effort—of generating new ideas by instantaneously revealing untold options. It will enable us to efficiently discard the ‘useless contraptions’ that cloud our vision and identify useful combinations previously unseen. It will empower us to broadly and efficiently canvas an incredibly vast range of domains to pull relevant knowledge from unexpected places. If used properly, AI will ultimately help us seed far greater innovation throughout our society.”
Become an AI-first organization
I invite you to take a look at our study. It is illuminating and filled with unique insights from companies across various industries from around the world. Like with most disruptive technologies (as we saw with the internet and smartphones), culture change is hard, but transforming your company’s value chains natively for AI is essential to truly take advantage of this ground-breaking technology—and to stay ahead of the competition.
Get more insights and discover the latest AI trends for business here
Download the complete TCS AI for Business survey here
