Aligning AI Strategy

to Business Goals

In determining your strategic response, key questions include how can different AI options help you to deliver your business goals and what is your appetite and readiness for change. Do you want to be an early adopter, faster follower or follower? Is your strategic objective for AI to transform your business or to disrupt your sector?

While investment in AI may seem expensive now, PwC subject matter specialists anticipate that the costs will decline over the next ten years as the software becomes more commoditised. Eventually, we'll move towards a free (or 'freemium' model) for simple activities, and a premium model for business-differentiating services. While the enabling technology is likely to be increasingly commoditised, the supply of data and how it's used are set to become the primary asset.

Trust and transparency are critical. In relation to autonomous vehicles, for example, AI requires people to trust their lives to a machine - that's a huge leap of faith for both passengers and public policymakers. Anything that goes wrong, be it a malfunction or a crash, is headline news. And this reputational risk applies to all forms of AI, not just autonomous vehicles. Customer engagement robots have been known to acquire biases through training or even manipulation, for example.