Tech leaders are moving beyond AI hype: Here’s what’s actually working

We have officially entered the era of “applied AI”. For many boards and C-suite leaders, understanding how to gain the most value from large language models and agentic AI is now the single most important strategic challenge of the day. From scaling up pilots to securing investment, driving measurable business impact to bringing employees along for the ride, the road to AI maturity is fraught with challenges. To dive further into this topic, and understand how enterprises are finding successes with AI, we convened a panel of technology leaders to share their insights and advice. From pilots to enterprise transformation One problem routinely cited by executives looking to make good on their AI investments is that they can get stuck in ‘pilot purgatory’, having started a number of exploratory projects before finding they won’t work on a larger scale. For Rahul Shah, global chief digital and information officer at Mars Pet Nutrition, the key is to break the process down into simpler steps. “We ended up saying: instead of immediately focusing on scale, let’s define the five big bets we’re going to make. Then we made the shift from pilots to scale, then from use cases to capability, and finally from information to decisions.” To identify these “big bets”, our panelists agreed that the best way was to delve into how employees are actually working day to day and seeking out opportunities to lighten the load. “You can work top-down, but you can also work bottom-up,” says Ursula Soritsch-Renier, group chief digital and information officer at Saint-Gobain, “using pain points employees throughout the business encounter every day.” Nigel Richardson, chief information and digitization officer at Reckitt, emphasizes that centering AI projects in people’s everyday work is the key to avoiding pilot purgatory. “Doing pilots is incredibly quick and easy—and you can do such impressive things really quickly. To really build something that is scalable is a whole different world. What we