Christopher Mims published a great article in the Wall Street Journal recently highlighting the barriers and bridges to AI adoption in Marketing using Clorox’s Hidden Valley Ranch division as a case study (link to article below). We have shared the dramatic visual he used to illustrate his point above. If a picture tells a thousand words, this is it! The image on the left was created by AI, the one on the right is after human refinement of the AI prompt.
Unpacking this further and cross-referencing it with our findings with C-suite in-depth interviews conducted so far this year, the following highlights emerge:
- We have now crossed the 50% threshold for AI in tasks across most business functions (Marketing, HR, Finance, etc.) with some nuances, of course as shown below.
- However, human interaction is still paramount in deploying AI. As the Wall St. Journal article also states approximately 30% human factor is necessary
- As expected, service operations for customers and employees are more than 75% automated with AI, given their extensive deployment of chatbots and agents
- Software development, currently at 30% to 40%, is the area where IT leaders expect most growth in the coming year and the most displacement of humans, very likely reducing offshored human workloads for US-based companies
- While a lot has been published online about cost-savings realized by automation, much by AI vendors, we did not draw meaningful conclusions from our research on cost-savings. Many leaders are still focused on implementation challenges and are still working on amortizing their costs in adopting AI tools. At best, when probed about the subject, their responses were still best guesses.
- We plan to conduct a C-suite study this Fall focusing completely on AI Economics and ROI, which will also identify the basis for these computations very much like we did for Cloud Economics a few years back. If you have questions you would like to see included, please contact me. (We will make a complementary copy of the study available to our Research Insights community.)
Link to Wall St. Journal article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/clorox-ai-hidden-valley-ranch-e997d3dc?st=eDXZ8c&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Alan Nazarelli is Founder & CEO of Silicon Valley Research Group. Based in San Jose, CA with offices in Seattle and New York, the company works with the world’s most innovative brands to provide timely and actionable market intelligence and strategic guidance to enable them to make well-informed decisions to positively impact revenues and profits and to achieve their growth targets. Connect with Al on Linked in
