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With the kind of technology disruption around, it’s quite possible for business owners and organizational decision makers to get tired of hearing about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its role in business transformation. Navigating this marketing hype and identifying the opportunities that AI presents for your business can be a huge task today. However, when you keep aside all the marketing hype, you will have sound reasons to begin investigating the benefits of AI for your business. The first step to analyze the possible AI benefits would be to separate the signal from the noise. So, how exactly can AI be leveraged enterprise wide? AI helps businesses build intelligent machines that automate redundant and time-consuming processes. Whether it is rebranding your legacy software or venturing into completely new technology solution, AI equips you with a new approach to accomplish whatever you want. Sidestepping the Confusion to Gain Clarity The existing hype revolves mainly around the lack of clarity on what exactly is AI. It is better to get more specific to sidestep such confusion. When most tech vendors talk about AI today, they actually mean Machine Learning (ML). ML is a subset of AI and is predominantly used to teach systems/computers how to perform wide array of tasks by quickly and accurately analyzing huge volumes of data. With recent breakthroughs in the areas of speech recognition, natural language processing and computer vision, the interest in AI has exploded like never before. These technological advancements are fueled by new approaches to implement ML. One such approach is deep learning, which are in turn have been made possible by leveraging modern processors and large quantities of data collected by organizations. Theoretically, ML is the technology that promises the automation of large areas of redundant work, which were manual processes until recently. Reinvestigating the Reality While the concept of automation and associated technological advancements have fascinated us like never before, the best way to understand enterprise AI is to stay close to reality. Well, the reality is majority of the businesses are lagging way behind in implementing AI and ML powered solutions and systems in production. Other companies are just experimenting with ML to remodel repetitive tasks, which are done by the employees. While numerous trends are being identified about enterprises adopting artificial intelligence, the best way would be to drill down further and learn how industries worldwide are planning and prioritizing it. Numerous surveys and studies have been conducted on the implementation of Artificial Intelligence enterprise wide. One such survey is AI Adoption in the Enterprise. The report of this survey upholds the fact that below 75% of the participants stated that they were either evaluating AI or not yet explored AI. However, the stage of implementation varied from one industry to another. The following table shows the stage of artificial intelligence adoption in companies across various industry sectors. Industry Sector % of Respondents having mature practice % of Respondents in evaluation stage % of Respondents not yet using AI Computers, Electronics & Technology 36 48 16 Financial Services 30 60 10 Education 9 49 42 Healthcare & Life Sciences 29 59 12 Telecommunications 30 45 25 Media & Entertainment 32 53 15 Public Sector/Government 16 55 29 The above data reflects the revenue-bearing AI projects that organizations have in production. With every passing day, the number of businesses ramping up their AI projects is continuously increasing. However, the best way to go about it would be to have realistic estimations about what AI projects can help your enterprise accomplish. Achieving initial attractive returns on your pilot project just by reducing the time of operations can be exciting. However, this is not a strong Return on Investment (ROI) to move forward with. So, AI projects should work in tandem with finance to predict long-term ROI projections.