Here is the Executive Summary for an article by Sam Ransbotham, François Candelon, David Kiron, Burt LaFountain, and Shervin Khodabandeh for the MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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The benefits of artificial intelligence go well beyond improved efficiency and decision-making. AI can also improve organizational effectiveness and strengthen teams and enterprise cultures. Artificial intelligence can generate cultural as well as financial benefits for organizations. With AI systems in place, teams can perform tasks with more pride and confidence and collaborate more effectively: They can actually get stronger.

These cultural benefits can penetrate the foundation of business operations, improving assumptions that drive organizational behaviors and ensuring the pursuit of smarter goals. When conducting our research, we heard story after story from executives familiar with AI implementations in their organizations. The overarching message was clear and backed up by survey data: Business culture affects AI deployments, and AI deployments affect business culture.

This MIT SMR-BCG report — based on a global survey of 2,197 managers and interviews with 18 executives — identifies a wide range of AI-related cultural benefits at both the team and organizational levels. Among survey respondents with AI implementations that improved efficiency and decision-making, for example, more than 75% also saw improvements in team morale, collaboration, and collective learning. Culture change from using AI transcends the legitimate, but myopic, promise that AI will liberate workers from drudgery.

These cultural changes are more than a side benefit. AI-related cultural and financial benefits build on each other. Survey respondents who saw significant financial benefits from their AI initiatives were 10 times more likely to change how they measure success than those who saw no such benefits. In some cases, AI helped leaders identify new performance drivers, which led to new assumptions, objectives, measures, and patterns of behavior, along with new areas of accountability.

AI also helped these organizations realign behaviors and become more competitive. Building a culture that supports innovation with AI has an effect on competitiveness. Our research found that respondents who use AI primarily to explore new ways of creating value are far more likely to improve their ability to compete with AI than those who use AI primarily to improve existing processes. Respondents who said they use AI primarily to explore were 2.7 times more likely to agree that their company captures opportunities from adjacent industries — because of AI — than respondents who use AI primarily to improve existing processes.

Whether it’s reconsidering business assumptions or empowering teams, managing relationships among culture, AI use, and organizational effectiveness is critical to increasing AI’s value to an organization. This report offers a data-driven analysis of these relationships at both the team and organization levels. The Cultural Be

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

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Sam Ransbotham is a professor in the information systems department at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, as well as guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Big Ideas initiative. François Candelon is a senior partner and managing director at BCG and the global director of the BCG Henderson Institute. He can be contacted at candelon.francois@bcg.com. David Kiron is the editorial director of MIT Sloan Management Review and is program lead for its Future of the Workforce and Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy projects. He can be contacted at dkiron@mit.edu. Burt LaFountain is a partner and managing director at BCG and a core member of BCG GAMMA. He can be reached at lafountain.burt@bcg.com. Shervin Khodabandeh is a senior partner and managing director at BCG and the coleader of BCG GAMMA (BCG’s AI practice) in North America. He can be contacted at shervin@bcg.com.

 

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