CIOs: The Captain to Direct and Steer the “ai Ship” for the future

A basic understanding of the organizations’ current or proposed AI ecosystem, and the support it can provide to the overall organizational goals can be obtained by engaging with all lines of business by kick-starting and ensuring constant conversations and pre-empting discussions with all leaders on their AI needs and wants

- Dmitri Chen

Today, businesses are increasingly embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI), making it one of the fastest growing technological innovations across the globe. As per IDC, the spending on the adoption of AI is growing by many folds and it is forecasted that the Asia Pacific spending on Cognitive and AI systems will reach $4.6 billion in 2021. Moreover, the adoption of AI technologies is predicted to grow by 46.9 percent between 2016- 2022, with the growth surfacing from AI project deployments in countries, especially in Asia, such as India, China, japan, etc. AI is now being embedded as a core component in many business functions such as design, marketing and operations. Even India’s AI taskforce has realised the importance of AI and released a plan to deploy AI in up to 10 sectors for the next 5 years.

However, in this vast segment of intelligent technology, the questions regarding proper implementation of AI to broadly fit into an organization’s overall plans along with the need for an apt business function overseeing these AI activities, needs to be addressed. According to a report by Forrester, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are optimally positioned to build an organization’s overall AI capabilities because the data, applications, servers, accelerators, fabric and storage infrastructures that they manage are critical for driving business value with AI. With companies globally planning to implement AI technologies in order to improve customer experiences and business operations, following are ways in which CIOs can navigate the uncharted terrain of AI for organizational success: