Despite everything, reports are still that enterprise AI ROI is elusive. At the same time, for enterprise buyers, the bill is finally coming due for the past year of AI amazement. It’s not cheap.
What’s up with this elusive enterprise AI? Gartner has some survey-driven theories for finance departments.
One theory is that there actually are productivity gains but they accrue to individuals, not the organization:
Gartner data presented in the keynote indicated that 84% of finance AI spend relates to individual productivity and process improvement use cases, while only 16% goes toward use cases that can materially change business outcomes.
Enterprise ROI does not scale, at least you can’t measure it. The leftist way of looking at it is that labor captures the value, not management/capital. For a human, this is great! Or, if you ponder at layoffs attributed to AI, it’s the opposite!
This, if you can’t measure it, you can’t ROI it:
According to the keynote, 71% of typical finance teams report low impact from their AI investments, and 62% of CFOs say fewer than a [25%] of their AI initiatives deliver measurable benefits.
I suspect this lack of seeing “impact” is also because we don’t know the uses of enterprise AI yet. Low in my list is that AI doesn’t actually work that well. It works well for me!
That said, like any other new tool, people need to learn how to use it. Typically, organizations are terrible at training people:
A major barrier is talent. Gartner research shows that only about 30% of finance talent currently qualifies as digital talent – employees who can build a technology solution when they encounter a problem – while breakaway firms are targeting 90% or more.
This has been the case for every type of new technology - remember all those Kubernetes surveys that showed that lack of skills was a top three problem? I’m sure relational databases and ERP systems had similar survey results.
Now, this all scoped to finance departments. However, I believe that it’s safe to generalize to other roles.
🔗 Gartner Says CFOs Risk Falling Behind Without a Scalable AI Strategy