CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 57

Business executives are making
signiﬁcant investments in artiﬁcial
intelligence to accelerate their digital
transformation initiatives. A Deloitte
survey of 1,100 IT and business
executives, conducted in the US in late
2018, found that 37% have invested $5
million or more in AI technologies. At
the same time, the survey, State of AI in
the Enterprise, 2nd Edition, found that
fewer executives than in the past were
conﬁdent that AI would transform their
companies in the near term.
One of the authors of the report,
Tom Davenport, is the President's
Distinguished Professor of IT and
Management at Babson College and
a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the
Digital Economy. Davenport has been
directly involved in the evolution of
enterprise data and its analysis, from the
development of early " expert systems " in
the 1980s to automated decision making
and knowledge management starting in
the late 1990s to documenting over the

Let's start by deﬁning what
exactly we are talking about
when we use the term
" artiﬁcial Intelligence " today.
AI employs knowledge, insight and
perception to solve narrowly deﬁned
tasks. We typically include in it activities
that heretofore were done only with
human brains. It's not a perfect deﬁnition
because AI also includes activities
that go beyond the capabilities of
human brains, like large scale data
analysis. There are several underlying
technologies that are typically included
in discussions of AI, ranging from robotic
process automation, or RPA, which at
least up to now hasn't been terribly
intelligent, to very advanced methods
of statistical analysis such as machine
learning and its most complex form,
deep learning.

Where in the enterprise do
you see these AI technologies
deployed today?

last ﬁfteen years the success of data-

AI technologies are making an impact

driven businesses and their big data

in all facets of the business

analytics initiatives. He has published

today, externally and

numerous inﬂuential articles and 18

internally. For example,

books, most recently The AI Advantage:

in the area of customer

How to Put the Artiﬁcial Intelligence

relations, enterprises

Revolution to Work, published by

are trying to improve

MIT Press.

their interactions with
customers by using

What is the state of AI in the enterprise?

conversational AI.

Gil Press, a CTO Straight Talk

Capital One offers

Contributing Writer talked recently to

its customers Eno, an

Davenport about why there is this mix of

intelligent assistant that

optimism and caution about the beneﬁts

helps with such tasks as

to be realized from the adoption of AI

fraud alerts and balance

technologies by businesses worldwide.

inquiries. Telefonica is
using conversational AI in

57
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4
