If you want to see the benefits of AI, forget moonshots and think boring

You hear a lot about wildly ambitious AI initiatives these days -- from curing diseases and solving world hunger to reversing climate change. While ambition is great and all, the problem with AI moonshots is that they generally crash and burn. Who can forget when the MD Anderson Cancer Center blew $62 million on a project to use IBM Watson to treat cancer that was later shelved. It's because of this harsh reality that Tom Davenport, distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, believes that if enterprises ever want to see the benefits of AI, they must embrace the mundane. While many CTOs might want to aim for the moon with their AI projects, speaking with Information Age at IPsoft's Digital Workforce Summit 2019, Davenport argued the best results come to those who opt to tackle a series of smaller projects first.