Drowning in AI: Companies are launching hundreds of projects, and that’s a problem

Managers and employees alike have gotten the message: AI is part of their job and it’s time to embrace it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, even as AI adoption is supposed to create efficiency, it can also do the opposite as dozens of teams and individuals stand up AI initiatives that are never finished or that serve no strategic purpose. “An executive knows there are three things that will move the needle for their business—not 300 things—but if you ask everyone how many use cases they have, they all have 300. But they’re not all equally important,” said Brett Greenstein, the Chief AI Officer at the consultancy firm West Monroe. Greenstein made the remark at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech in Aspen earlier this month as part of a roundtable that examined the benefits and pitfalls of rapid AI adoption across different corporate sectors. Sean Bruich, SVP and CTO of pharmaceutical giant Amgen, described himself as “a card carrying data scientist” and is deeply familiar with AI. He made the case that some companies may need to focus less on the technical dimensions of AI, and more on the business and political challenges of implementing these new tools. “The explosion of pilots around AI inside a company can become an incredible drag on your ability to move quickly, because each one of those has a champion and a team and a set of KPIs and a data engineering squad,” said Bruich, who said too many pilots can obscure which elements of AI are delivering business value, and that some firms are too slow to kill the ones that don’t. Dan Gill related that he has learned similar lessons as Chief Product Officer at Carvana, a logistics heavy firm that arranges vehicle purchases between millions of buyers and sellers, and runs a massive financing operation. “Getting one thing all the way done is much more valuable than five things progressed to 20% each,” he observed. “[AI means] prototyping