Why are so many businesses failing to scale AI and risk going out of business in the next five years?

Many firms want to generate business value by scaling AI, but they struggle to move beyond pilots and prototypes. AI is often considered a data science topic, when in reality the collaboration of domain experts, IT professionals, and data scientists is needed for success. Our latest research from University of St.Gallen and SMU Cox School of Business shows, that AI democratization provides a comprehensive approach for addressing the most important and often unaddressed, underlying challenges.

AI democratization integrates the skills of domain experts, data scientists and IT professionals to enable AI scaling into productive IT applications:

• Domain experts own business and problem understanding.
• Data scientists build AI models.
• IT professionals provide software tools and data platforms.

Successful executives master the transition from tactical AI pilot use cases to strategic AI enablement and then to AI democratization for business transformation. AI democratization supports the exploration and realization of AI value potentials based on deep domain knowledge and provides cost advantages through efficient provisioning and scaling of AI. Our research offers three AI democratization lessons:

• Lesson 1: Executives focus tirelessly on creating customer value with AI, which is rooted in deep domain, problem, and business knowledge.
• Lesson 2: Executives embrace and facilitate dialogue between business, data science and IT representatives to build trust into AI.
• Lesson 3: Executives ensure efficiency and scalability of AI by implementing processes and data platforms to secure scale economies and learning curve effects.

Please find specific and actionable suggestions on how executives can advance the democratization of AI in our newly published research article in MIS Quarterly Executive: "How Siemens Democratized Artificial Intelligence". Sincere thanks go to the Siemens partners and the MISQE editorial board for the excellent collaboration!