Where has your organization found the most strategic value in AI that justified pulling resources from other areas? What made those initiatives different?

We have found the most strategic value with AI when there is clear ROI, scoped implementation, minimal business disruption, and alignment with existing workflows. AI is particularly exciting for accelerating automation to reduce toil in workflows. For IT, this means decreased operational overhead and increased engineering time. For other business areas, it generally shifts workers from repeatable, manual tasks to value-added knowledge work where their subject matter expertise has greater impact.

Our strategic value lies in processing large volumes of unstructured data. We replaced traditional search projects with AI-driven solutions, recognizing that old-fashioned search is obsolete. The key is to reallocate resources from low-performing projects to those with higher ROI, and AI is no different in this respect.

As a higher education institution, we identified four strategic areas for AI: student learning, research, administration, and IT support. We formed an AI task force with cross-university representation to assess readiness and strategic direction. Our published task force report guides project prioritization, balancing stakeholder enthusiasm and risk concerns.

It’s about weighing the value gained from AI initiatives against other infrastructure or development projects. We now have conversations with business units to determine which initiatives offer the most ROI, pushing them to prioritize based on value.

The most successful AI projects are those that reduce costs, increase productivity, or reduce risk. Initiatives that free up or augment capacity, such as AI-powered communications in call centers, have provided the most value and justified reallocating resources.