How to transform AI pilots into biz impact

Enterprises are not short of AI ambition. They are short of the hard plumbing needed to turn ambition into business change. That was the consensus in a discussion that we had in association with Publicis Sapient, as part of a series called ₹AI that’s built to deliver’. The problem, they said, is rarely the lack of AI experiments. It is the inability to change workflows, data foundations, operating models, governance, talent and business ownership to make AI solutions scale.“Thousands of pilots are going on. But the question then becomes, how do I create value and outcomes out of it?” said Harish Gudi, SVP at Optum Insight, the data, analytics, and technology services division of Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the world’s largest healthcare company. That, he said, requires reimagining processes. In healthcare, that means rethinking, for instance, the journey from insurance claim filing to cost determination, payer processing, member communication and payment. Today, that can take days or months. AI, Gudi said, offers a chance to make the process real-time, frictionless and end-to-end.Sanjay Menon, EVP and MD for India at Publicis Sapient, said many pilots stall because they are managed in a sandbox. Scaling requires changing the operating model. He cited a retailer that used AI in a pilot project to cut demand-signalling-to-inventory-procurement time from seven days to six hours. But the company stopped at five days because going further would require changing processes and roles. “Where they get stalled is usually just on the intent of how much are you ready to bite the bullet and let the change scale,” Menon said, adding that ultimately, leadership is key.Sanjiv Kumar, digital engineering lead for corporate banking at Kotak Mahindra Bank, provided an example from supply-chain finance to underline the importance of process change, and the responsibility of leadership. He said if a previously onboarded customer comes with a request to finance 100 invoices, should he be asked to produce all 100 invoices, or are a few enough, can AI read the invoices and reconcile them. Someone has to decide what’s best for the bank. “AI can’t do that. If you need to have a P&L impact (of AI), the leadership has to get involved to change the way the processes are,” he said.Getting Governance RightAI governance is another essential element in scaling. Mohua Sengupta, SVP and country head for India at US insurance company The Standard, said the critical factor in insurance is trust. Insurers engage with customers during difficult moments. That makes full automation neither desirable nor acceptable. “In insurance, the gating principle to move from experimentation to scaling is trust,” Sengupta said. So, auditability is key, and there’s no question of automating empathy. t The Standard, AI is being used, for instance, to identify missing data faster, reducing claims timelines by six days in some cases. A decision engine has cut another two days. But Sengupta said while claim acceptance can be AI-led, denials always have a human review.Kumar said banking faces similar constraints because it deals with public money. There are some use cases, he said, where you can be predictive, but ultimately, certainty of the software is essential.Rewards & CompetenciesShaji Philipose, MD at the India GCC of globally tyre maker Bridgestone, underlined how employee performance metrics need to change to ensure AI’s business impact. He noted how organisations traditionally looked at how many people have been put into a job, how many hours they worked. “I think the future is all about who is agile enough to adopt all the latest AI tools, who is taking risks, who has the guts to take a decision that can impact several jobs,” he said.Sandhya Varanasi, India hub CTO for energy management at Schneider Electric, emphasised the criticality of upskilling talent, and leadership’s central role in this upskilling, and in continuously evaluating how competencies are evolving. “With AI, what are the shifts in roles happening, should a particular role be completely transformed? That’s a key role we play as leaders – to constantly evaluate that,” she said.