AI for Work
While many professionals still have issues in wrapping their brain about what AI is and what it can do (and can't do), there are folks out there going through "the great awakening". One of these is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who uses a Salesforce bot called Einstein to assist in making decisions on corporate strategy.
As detailed in this article from the Kurzweil AI site, Salesforce's Einstein is just one example of how anyone making business-level decisions, from executives to knowledge workers, can benefit from AI trained to interpret specific data sets. From analyzing consumer response to an advertising campaign to interpreting the social media response to a corporate event, humans benefit greatly from AI assistance.
Modern systems such as ERP and CRM gather so much data (or can, if used properly) that the sheer amount can be overwhelming to even trained statisticians. Using specialized "AI bots" to make sense of this data can add immense value to decision making.
All this added value that AI can bring to the process of running a business will bring a deepening of the "digital divide" with it. Companies whose management doesn't understand AI nor the value this type of analysis has will continue to be run as companies have since the beginning of time (or at least since the Italians invented double-entry accounting): by the "seat of the pants". While personal experience is a great asset for managers, not seeing the forest for the trees is something anyone with a lot of experience has to deal with.
Many private plane crashes are caused over proportionally by very experienced pilots. The phenomenon is well-studied and easily explained: pilots with thousands of hours racked up will often not bother taking the preflight checklist in hand; after all, they've done it so often they know what they need to go over. Similarly, the effectiveness and - more importantly, the future of companies managed by "gut feelings" or "seat of the pants" decisioning is often based on a small group of people or even a single person.
Companies embracing AI technology to generate a sounder base for making long-reaching decisions (or even small, day-to-day ones) will benefit greatly, while companies whose executive management shies away from employing this technology will likely fail.