Most companies developing AI capabilities have yet to gain significant benefits
&quot;One key: continued experimenting with AI, even if an initial project doesn’t yield a big payoff. The authors say the most successful companies learn from early uses of AI and adapt their business practices based on the results. Among those that did this most effectively, 73 percent say they see returns on their investments. Companies where employees work closely with AI algorithms—learning from them but also helping to improve them—also fared better, the report found.<p>“The people that are really getting value are stepping back and letting the machine tell them what they can do differently,” says Sam Ransbotham, a professor at Boston College who coauthored the report. He says there is no simple formula for seeing a return on investment, but adds that “the gist is not blindly applying” AI to a business’s processes.&quot;<p>As Robin Hanson puts it, &#x27;automation as colonization wave&#x27;. Just like electricity or computers or telephones or remote working: they always underperform initially because of the stickiness of organizations and bureaucracies.<p>Per Conway&#x27;s law, no organization <i>wants</i> to reorganize itself to use a new technology like software, they want to make the new technology an imitation of itself, old wine in 5% more efficient new skins. It takes either intense near-death-experiences (see: remote working&#x2F;corona) to force a shift, or starting up new businesses or units to be born-digital.<p>Those who undergo the birth trauma, like Google, are sitting on a river of AI gold and putting AI into everything; those who fail will whine on surveys about how AI is a scam and overhyped and an AI winter will hit Real Soon Now Just You Wait (it will pop any second now, just like how the media has regularly reported since 2009 about how the Big Tech bubble would pop)...