Get with the times: Using AI to increase revenue

A new global study has revealed that AI has been deployed in abundance by senior business leaders to boost revenue.

The TCS AI for Business Global Study discussed the state of AI adoption and its impact on businesses and found that 86 per cent of senior business leaders have already deployed AI to enhance existing revenue streams or create new ones.

Close to seven out of 10 (69 per cent) of businesses are more focused on using AI to spur innovation and increase revenue than on productivity, improvement, and cost optimisation, highlighting the shift up the priority list that AI has taken.

Optimism and excitement are rife among senior business leaders when it comes to AI implementation, with 57 per cent expressing such feelings. Most (65 per cent) believe AI will augment and enhance human capabilities, enabling people to focus on higher-value activities that require creativity and strategic thinking.

Dr Harrick Vin, chief technology officer at TCS, said: “2023 was a year of exuberance, with every enterprise experimenting with AI/GenAI use cases. We are now entering an era of wide-and-deep enterprise AI adoption. Enterprises, however, are realising that the path to production for AI solutions is not easy and that building an AI-mature enterprise is a marathon, not a sprint.”

“Our AI study has confirmed this sentiment; it has also highlighted that enterprises feel underprepared to deploy AI solutions at scale as well as to manage the profound shifts in the roles of people and ways of working resulting from such deployments.”

Other key findings from the report included:

• Executives believe the impact of AI will be greater than or equal to that of the internet (54 per cent) and smartphones (59 per cent).
• Corporate functions with the most completed AI projects: Finance/comptroller (completion rate of 29 per cent); HR (completion rate of 28 per cent); Marketing (completion rate of 28 per cent).
• Sixty-five per cent of senior executives said their competitive advantage will still come from humans – with their creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking unleashed by AI’s augment and assist capabilities.
• Forty per cent of executives said that in the future, they have a lot of changes to make to their business before they can take full advantage of AI.
• Over half (55 per cent) said they were actively making changes right now to their business or operating models, or to their products and services, due to the potential benefits and risks of AI.
• Eighty-one per cent of executives highlight the need for global AI standards and regulations.

Sivaraman Ganesan, head of AI cloud business unit at TCS, said: “When calibrated for accuracy and harnessed responsibly, GenAI makes the computational power of the data, cloud, and AI come alive. Add in human ingenuity and organisations can create a new paradigm for the modern marketplace.”

Kace O'Neill

Kace O'Neill is a Graduate Journalist for HR Leader. Kace studied Media Communications and Maori studies at the University of Otago, he has a passion for sports and storytelling.