A new study from McKinsey about the business value of AI – along with a review by CFODive – offer interesting thoughts for sustainability professionals, but maybe not like you think. The study and article offer the latest business case developments for companies implementing AI. Sustainability practitioners should apply these same lessons to quantifying the business value of their efforts as well.
A few tidbits about how companies – primarily those McKinsey calls “high performers” – are implementing AI that offer relevant approaches sustainability professionals can use to demonstrate their organizational value:
“Generative AI is helping cut costs and pump up revenue… Companies most commonly use it to support marketing strategy, personalize marketing, identify and prioritize sales leads, create designs for services and products, review research, and speed simulation and testing…
Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI.
To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.”
CFODive offers a general summary by referring to an article co-written by the AICPA and CPA.com, saying AI: “makes it possible to create new and better business models and more precisely match value to cost.” In other words, business fundamentals – not focusing on investor needs directly (like ESG/sustainability frequently does).
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