Consulting Condensed: 5 Insights from Accenture’s Artificial Intelligence Survey

Management Consultancies are an excellent source of information to understand how the Artificial Intelligence market is evolving and how executives are responding. In the ‘Consulting Condensed’ series, I briefly summarise their key findings, so you don’t have to read the lengthy original reports.

Accenture just published their latest report on AI. They surveyed 1,500 C-suite executives across 12 industries and 16 countries.

Here are the five key insights I gained from reading the report:

The executives surveyed believe they must aggressively accelerate their adoption of AI, otherwise their businesses will face an existential threat.

Three-quarters of executives believe they risk going out of business within five years if they don’t scale AI. 84 per cent believe AI is essential to achieve their growth objectives.

Accenture segmented the participants into three groups: those stuck with a “proof of concept factory”, those “strategically scaling” and those “industrialized for growth”.

They report that the majority are immature, with only 15-20 per cent scaling, a view in line with my experiences. Such results also align with other surveys. In the Intelligent Automation segment, Deloitte found only eight per cent of the firms have implemented 50+ automations.

Those who are strategically scaling achieved nearly 3X the return on investment achieved by companies pursuing siloed proofs of concept. This equated to an estimated $110m in additional returns from AI projects. Core financial success metrics (e.g. PE ratios) improved 32% per cent on average for these companies.

These metrics validate the claim that AI is a “winner takes all” opportunity. There are positive feedback loops. Leaders achieved 2X the project success rate.

Leadership wasn’t achieved through funding; the leaders achieved more for less. Lack of budget was the least-cited barrier to AI adoption.

Accenture’s analysis identified that leaders had a clearly defined AI strategy, anchored to the firm’s core business objectives. This is very logical - framing a project correctly in business terms is fundamental to its success but easily neglected.

The leaders took managing data more seriously and “invested heavily in data quality, data management, and data governance frameworks on the cloud”. 92 per cent also built multi-disciplinary teams across the business.

To realize AI’s full potential, Accenture recommends a more deliberate approach. This includes:

·      Committing to investment to facilitate large-scale change, “without the need to prove ROI in advance”.

·      Adopting a digital platform mindset, consuming data at reduced cost and enabling enhanced collaboration.

·      Building trust by creating an ethical framework that is consistent with customer expectations, company values, local laws, and societal norms. Colin Priest has an excellent guide on how to do this in practice.

Read the full Accenture report at: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Assets/PDF-2/Accenture-Built-to-Scale-PDF-Report.pdf