Where to Begin: Building Real Value from AI

The enthusiasm around artificial intelligence is easy to understand. Reports from McKinsey and others show that organizations using AI effectively can unlock measurable value across operations, quality, and customer experience. Yet, McKinsey’s 2025 report Beyond the Hype: Unlocking Value from the AI Revolution highlights an important reality: while 80 percent of companies have begun using AI, most have not yet achieved significant impact.

That disconnect is not due to lack of technology. It stems from how organizations approach it. As the report notes, building a prototype is easy, but embedding AI into business critical workflows is not. True value comes when a company reimagines its processes, connects its data, and aligns business and technical capabilities behind a clear roadmap.

This challenge is familiar to many organizations now weighing two difficult choices:

• Should we develop a custom AI solution internally, investing time and resources to build capability and control

• Or should we adopt a secure, out of the box platform that provides compliance, scalability, and measurable outcomes sooner

The regulatory landscape adds further complexity. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, entering into force from 2025, establishes strict requirements for transparency, data governance, and human oversight. For companies in regulated or critical sectors, compliance is not optional. It must be embedded from the start.

Given these dynamics, starting with a trusted, enterprise grade foundation often makes strategic sense. Platforms such as IBM Watsonx offer an immediate path to experimentation within a secure, compliant, and data sovereign environment. Once your team has identified its most critical business processes, whether in asset management, monitoring, or customer operations, you can begin deploying out of the box AI capabilities safely and at scale.

From there, the learning compounds. As your organization gains confidence and maturity, custom applications can be developed on top of a robust, standards based architecture, combining the best of internal expertise and proven technology.

The starting point is not the tool but the roadmap. Begin by identifying your critical business processes, redesigning them for efficiency, mapping use cases, and sequencing them by impact and feasibility. With that foundation, AI can move from experimentation to execution, creating value in measurable, governed, and sustainable ways.

Ready to begin? Contact us, and we will help you map your AI roadmap from identifying value to achieving compliance and measurable impact.