Forget novelty experiments, it's time to get real with AI

The world of artificial intelligence is beset by hype and hubris. But make no mistake: AI has the potential to make businesses more efficient and faster. Yet, as transformative technologies keep getting smarter and cheaper, businesses' return on innovation investment has declined by 27 per cent over the last five years, according to a report from Accenture. To Ray Eitel-Porter, who heads up Accenture Applied Intelligence in the UK, the evidence points to one problem: companies don't know how to make the most of AI and data analytics, and how they can apply to business problems. AI is a transformative technology, so businesses should be ambitious and think about solutions that would yield ten times the impact of traditional investments – not just a ten per cent improvement.