The Organizations Capturing AI’s Value Are Doing Something Different
Discover why the organizations seeing real AI value are taking a different approach—focusing on strategy and measurable business outcomes over experimentation.
Joseph Ours, Director of AI Solutions at Centric Consulting, joined the Digital Transformation Podcast to explain why so many AI pilots never make it to production, and what closes the gap.
The Digital Transformation Podcast, hosted by Kevin Craine, features interviews with best-selling authors and thought leaders on digital transformation.
On the episode, “Moving from Experimentation to Impact with AI,” Ours told Craine why so many companies get stuck between piloting AI and putting it into production. The gap, he said, has little to do with the technology itself.
“Two-thirds of organizations have AI initiatives, but only about six percent actually scale any significant agentic solution because they’re not tackling the hardest part of the problem,” Ours said.
Extracting the institutional knowledge from employees and building that judgment into the system, including giving agents a clear way to escalate to a person instead of guessing, is why most proof-of-concept stall.
That kind of organizational change management is what separates a demo that impresses a room from a system that runs reliably every day.
Ours also pointed to a common trap in how organizations choose what to build. He tells clients to start with their pain points, then weigh business value against whether the organization can support the solution long term.
“If you cannot define a KPI that you’re measuring against, it’s not a valid use case,” he said. “It’s an idea.”
That discipline also applies to how leaders frame AI internally.
“AI is never your strategy,” Ours said, adding that executives should define the business strategy first and treat AI as the mechanism that gets them there faster.
The conversation also touched on the difference between replicating a business function at scale, what Ours calls an agentic workforce, and using AI as a one-off personal assistant, along with why cost management and governance will become bigger pressures for organizations over the next 18 months as agentic AI spend increases.
Listen to the full episode, “Moving from Experimentation to Impact with AI,” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
