Where’s the ROI for AI? CIOs struggle to find it

“I have found very few companies who have found ROI with AI at all thus far,” he adds. “Most companies are simply playing with the novelty of AI still.”

The concern about calculating the ROI also rings true to Stuart King, CTO of cybersecurity consulting firm AnzenSage and developer of an AI-powered risk assessment tool for industrial facilities. With the recent red-hot hype over AI, many IT leaders are adopting the technology before they know what to do with it, he says.

“I think back to the first discussions that we had within the organizations that are working with, and it was a case of, ‘Here’s this great new thing that we can use now, let’s go out and find a use for it,’” he says. “What you really want to be doing is finding a problem to solve with it first.”

As a developer who has integrated AI into his own software, King is not an AI skeptic. He believes there can be a return on investment if organizations are smart about where they focus their AI efforts.

“Ultimately, like any new tool that you implement in any environment, essentially it comes down to learning it and knowing how to get the best out of it,” he says. “Once you’ve gotten over that first hurdle and that first learning curve, there are a lot of problems that AI can solve for you.”

First, find the use case

The Gartner survey found generative AI to be the most adopted AI-related technology, with 28% of the respondents saying their organizations had rolled it out. Close behind were machine learning and natural language processing.