This article in Financial Times refreshed a question that I have been struggling with for a long time: Why are companies hesitant to use AI?

AI is all around us and everyone has heard about it. Large companies with massive engineering staff are refusing to use AI, and I think this article points out one of the main reasons. If companies of all kinds started using AI effectively, to teach data sets to learn and understand data, this would mean new processes which would change operations and organizations. A logical explanation contends that the complications with unwanted organizational and operational complications are what is holding companies back.

Let’s take your credit card company: They have tons of data about you, your habits, and patterns. If they deployed AI to ‘understand’ you better, they could offer new services and delight you more, but that would mean that your credit card company would need to enhance and evolve operations to create and manage new offerings and much more. As a result, nothing has changed in the world of credit cards (other than mobile features) for decades. Massive amounts of data are being ignored, AI is not being deployed and credit companies are not evolving. Such a loss. Lose-Lose for both sides!

The same holds with banking and insurance services. They too hold massive amounts of data and information on all of us which could be used to improve services and build new offerings but are not using AI effectively (or at all) and the same reasons may hold for them. Imagine next time that you call your bank or insurance company that they ‘know you’, understand your needs, have services to delight you ready to go, and all of this before you said hello! Instead, after decades of being a client, you have to start off mentioning your account number & names, as if it were the first encounter!

The advantages of mindful AI are many. The question is how long can companies avoid improving services via AI, as they resist evolving?

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