38% firms expect $10 million In ROI as a result of IT modernization

With the ideals of the digital economy quickly permeating into every industry and impacting every business, transforming a company’s IT infrastructure to bring products to market faster and remain competitive has become inevitable. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still considered an emerging technology, it has already started delivering considerable business value.

Hence, Dell EMC recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the IT team and IT transformation efforts. The report titled ‘CIOs Need to Take the Lead on AI for Transformational Outcomes across the Company’, conducted the survey with 353 respondents from large enterprises across the globe.

The survey shows that enterprises are frantically working to test and launch Artificial Intelligence initiatives, and these initiatives are already delivering results. However, the wave of Artificial Intelligence implementation is just beginning:

• Enterprises are using AI to understand customers today and improve the customer experience in the future: In the next 12 months, 54% of companies plan on using AI to help create and deliver a better customer experience. More than half of firms plan to use AI to improve business and IT operational efficiencies

• The AI journey is just starting for some and continues for others: Some companies (21%) are still in the early stages of their AI journeys, whereas a majority of enterprises (52%) are exploring or leveraging more complex building blocks for deploying AI. The most advanced firms (27%) go further still, pursuing platforms and solutions for developing and deploying their own custom AI solutions

• Involving the IT team leads to use of more AI building blocks: When the IT organization leads or collaborates with the lines of business, the company is pursuing not only more AI building blocks overall, but is using more advanced AI technologies

“There is no doubt that AI is helping deliver revenue growth with better customer experiences, increasing innovation, and improving operational effectiveness. However, most firms are just getting started, and many are pursuing a broad array of uncoordinated AI initiatives.” Says Niladri Saha, Director- Modern Data Center, Dell EMC, India, Dell EMC “Therefore, it is crucial for CIOs to take the helm, engage the lines of business on their AI initiatives, and ultimately drive the AI agenda to ensure successful outcomes and mitigate risks. There is a need to invest in new software applications, infrastructure as well as platforms necessary for AI. This will help modernize existing systems to better support the ever-increasing number of AI initiatives, ultimately leading to better business outcomes”.

Forrester’s in-depth survey of IT and business leaders about AI, also yielded several important recommendations:

• CIOs need to lead the company’s AI initiatives: CIOs must proactively lead the AI conversation and get ahead of the broad array of AI initiatives happening across the company. Their organizations must eventually develop, deploy, and maintain AI solutions for the enterprise that reconcile the business need for agility with the IT team’s need for security and data governance

• IT needs to modernize its infrastructure to deliver AI at scale: AI requires highly scalable IT infrastructure that is optimized for machine learning calculations, as well as a host of new platforms ranging from deep learning to speech and text analytics

• Build AI capabilities with an AI center of excellence: CIOs are optimally positioned to build centralized expertise on AI for the entire company. CIOs must step out of their comfort zones, embrace both the wide scope of AI and its rapidly evolving nature, and acquire entirely new AI expertise and capabilities