The CIO's journey to artificial intelligence

AI will play an increasingly important role in the top three business objectives often cited by CEOs -- greater customer intimacy, increasing competitive advantage and improving efficiency. From the 1980s Lisp machines and Deep Blue in 1997 to the debut of IBM's Watson in 2010s, AI in various forms has been around for a long time. But commercial uses of AI are in specialised industry-specific applications such as actuarial forecasts and medical diagnosis -- making CIOs understandably cautious about promoting AI's potential business value. Savvy CIOs are experimenting jointly with business peers to discover top uses and ROI for AI to evaluate its potential to disrupt markets and remake existing business models. This is been done at a pace that has left many CIOs hurrying to build an AI strategy and investment plan appropriate for their enterprise.