While many companies are progressing well in using artificial intelligence tools for productivity gains, far fewer are employing them to help with strategic growth initiatives. There is a lack of trust — yet overcoming that barrier may separate leaders from laggards in the upcoming years, EY-Parthenon contends in a new report.
In a survey commissioned by EY-P, the consulting arm of Ernst & Young, 63% of the 271 participants — all of them at the vice president level or higher and charged with overseeing company growth — said AI is helping them with efficiency and productivity.
At the same time, only 14% of those polled said they are leveraging AI to stay ahead of competitors, while just 8% are doing so to reach new customers and 7% to diversify revenue streams.
EY-P suggested in a research report that the need for change should be obvious, considering that 80% of the corporate growth leaders said the environment for business growth is more challenging than it was a year ago.
In fact, almost all (97%) of the survey participants said external forces have led their business to change its growth strategy in the past year.
“The survey reflects what is in the news every day,” EY-P wrote. That is, the leading drivers of changing growth strategies, the report said, are: (1) geopolitical and economic pressures and volatility, affecting 73% of survey participants, and (2) technological innovation, influencing 58% of those polled.
“The days of a three-year growth plan may be a thing of the past, and companies are looking for a catalyst to accelerate expansion despite the current conditions,” the report declared. “Enter AI for growth, not just productivity.”
Many survey participants are optimistic about possible improvements in selling or serving customers (63%) or developing new growth markets (57%).
However, a troubling perception gap remains. While a large majority (78%) of those surveyed said they expect AI to accelerate their company’s growth rate, just 34% said they trust AI to support decision-making in growth-related areas.
The leading factors preventing companies from innovating faster than competitors are risk and compliance challenges and legacy technology and infrastructure.
According to Mitch Berlin, EY Americas vice chair for EY-P, the companies that will “win” will be “those that figure out first how to leverage AI to drive growth by innovating faster, hyper-personalizing their offerings, and launching new products and services.”
EY-P said working with clients on the frontier of leveraging AI for growth has revealed a few key emerging themes:
- Harnessing AI to mine a company’s intellectual property and patent data to help drive growth. “Companies can then find new uses for products that can be developed and markets that can be addressed.”
- Driving greater value from core systems. “Recent advances in AI-based reasoning allow companies to separate decision intelligence from transactional systems … and continuously [learn] from outcomes rather than relying on static rules.”
- Tapping into the promise of neuro-symbolic AI. “NSAI combines the ability of neural networks to learn from structured and unstructured data with a symbolic layer of rules and parameters that create consistent, auditable and transparent results for decision-making.”
