Enterprise AI spending soars: Set to surpass $500 billion by 2027
By 2025, Global 2000 organizations will allocate over 40% of their core IT spend to AI-related initiatives. By 2027, spending on AI will surpass $500 billion, with AI-enhanced products and services likely becoming the de facto standard for everything from sales and customer care to IT help desks. But many organizations lack a clear strategy to effectively leverage AI adoption for bottom-line results.
Leading AI-centric enterprises are adopting AI for strategic insights that directly impact their bottom line. For instance, global innovators are using AI to analyze weather patterns and historical sales data to predict spikes in demand across different regions, allowing them to adjust distribution strategies and maximize sales.
Similarly, innovative utility companies leverage AI to monitor and forecast energy usage patterns based on demographic projections, optimizing energy production and distribution to better match demand. But here’s the big question: Given AI's vast potential, how can you translate AI adoption into value that aligns with your stakeholders' strategic goals and objectives?
Translating AI adoption into business value
Clearly, AI is a powerful catalyst for digital transformation. It has enormous potential to accelerate enterprise productivity and open up a whole new world of innovation and growth. But before hitching a ride on the AI rocketship, it's essential to shift from a capabilities focus to a mindset that leverages AI to solve operational pain points.
AI is adept at tackling specific business challenges. Whether it's automating intricate operational tasks to boost employee productivity, streamlining customer onboarding processes to accelerate revenue generation, or handling the heavy lifting of data collection and analysis to expedite decision-making, AI is the solution.
As we delve deeper into the business impacts of AI adoption, let's explore how digital leaders are harnessing AI to revolutionize operations and drive business expansion. The following section highlights real-world examples demonstrating why AI adoption is not just a technical upgrade but a strategic trend helping enterprises become more creative, productive, and competitive.
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Accelerate business growth
A leading Australian consumer finance company invested in Appian’s AI-powered low-code platform to streamline the end-to-end processing of finance applications across its consumer and commercial finance and leasing operations. This led to a remarkable 70% increase in business volume and a 53% boost in productivity for the company’s credit and settlements team.
Additionally, the company now approves 85% of mortgage applications in less than one day and 42% of asset finance loans through digital workflows, paving the way for on-the-spot, AI-driven credit decisions for future customers.
As enterprises explore the potential of AI, they are discovering substantial benefits across a broad spectrum of applications. For example:
AI-driven customization and personalization allow businesses to cater to individual customer preferences, significantly enhancing user satisfaction and sales.
Integrating AI into features and functionality—such as enhanced smartphone photographic capabilities and predictive functionalities in smart home devices—maximizes product innovation.
AI's role in quality control, exemplified by its use in automotive manufacturing for precision assembly and defect detection, enhances product reliability.
AI's predictive analytics helps industries like healthcare and financial services anticipate customer needs through data-driven insights.
Pairing AI with IoT devices elevates the intelligence of consumer products, making them more interactive and responsive to user needs.
These diverse use cases highlight the transformative impact of AI adoption and set the stage for real-world examples of how enterprises derive value from AI.
See quick, tangible business impact
Magical things happen when you use AI to automate mundane and repetitive tasks. For one, you free up employees to work on more complex and strategic activities. For example, the aerospace and defense company GDIT invested in Appian's process automation platform to overcome the inefficiencies of numerous paper-based processes.
As a result, GDIT reduced invoice processing time from days to hours and expedited approvals for hundreds of monthly invoices worth $1.2 billion annually. Moreover, the company expanded its AI-powered platform to over 35,000 seats and developed 60+ applications, enabling employees to spend more time on mission-critical work.
Bolster supply chain resilience
AI revolutionizes supply chain management by providing real-time analytics and predictive insights that help companies anticipate supply needs, optimize routes, and avoid potential disruptions. For instance, a major supermarket chain created a mobile application using an AI-powered process automation platform. This app allowed drivers to pick up assignments, check in, and get delivery information, decreasing driver turnaround times, cutting reconciliations in half, and saving more than $1 million in the first year alone.
Another prominent retailer faced challenges managing its complex supply chain, lacking real-time visibility into inventory, order status, and supplier performance. Using AI process automation, they developed a supply chain management platform that delivered the following value to business stakeholders:
Real-time inventory visibility:
- Consolidated data from multiple sources provides real-time stock levels, preventing stockouts and reducing excess inventory.
Order tracking and management:
- Custom applications track and manage orders, offering real-time updates to address issues promptly.
Supplier performance monitoring:
- Integrated supplier performance data enabled tracking of lead times, quality, and costs, identifying high-performing suppliers and mitigating risks.
Data-driven forecasting:
- Access to real-time data improved demand forecast accuracy, reducing stockouts and carrying costs.
Scalable solutions:
- The platform quickly and easily scaled to keep pace with the retailer's evolving needs without breaking the bank.
AI models are adept at analyzing sales data, seasonal trends, and external factors to predict future inventory requirements accurately. Retail giants like Amazon use AI to precisely forecast inventory needs, minimize overstocking, and reduce warehousing costs. This ensures products are available when customers need them and enhances the overall efficiency of inventory management systems.
Supercharge operational efficiency
A leading fire protection company grew to one of the largest in the Southeast US, with over 1,500 employees across 30 offices in 12 states. Despite their success, they faced a significant challenge in their accounts payable process. Handling approximately 10,000 invoices per month, with 80% coming from 15 core vendors, was labor-intensive and costly. Mailed-in invoices were handled manually, slowing the process and making it error-prone.
To overcome these challenges, the company adopted an AI-driven accounts payable management application. This innovative solution uses document classification and extraction AI to streamline the invoice processing workflow. The new system automatically extracts data from invoices, issues invoices, and updates relevant systems, requiring human intervention only when discrepancies arise.
The impact was profound. The company's data extraction accuracy jumped from 63% to 87%. Moreover, the AI system could automatically handle 93% of the document volume, allowing the company to streamline its operations, significantly reduce manual processing, and reallocate its workforce to cover more mission-critical tasks.
Obliterate barriers to product innovation
AI is a powerful tool in product innovation. It enables faster and more accurate simulations and modeling, which lets companies develop new products faster. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, AI algorithms can predict how different chemical compounds will react, speeding up the drug discovery process. This reduces the duration and expense of research and development cycles, allowing companies to bring new drugs to market more quickly.
When a leading multinational pharmaceutical company wanted to integrate a new framework for ethical conduct into its daily operations, it leveraged Appian’s AI-powered automation platform to seamlessly embed ethical practices across the company's workflows.
The platform manages ethical risks in a rapidly evolving industry and highly regulated environment. It automates dynamic risk assessments, ensures compliance with country-specific requirements, and streamlines ethical practices across thousands of workflows and hundreds of locations.
As a result, the company saw a 55% reduction in workflow approval times, cutting the average approval time from 5.4 days to just 2.6 days. Additionally, the platform implementation led to a 90% reduction in IT service desk tickets and generated $5 million in direct operational savings.
Once fully deployed, the platform will serve 70,000 users, manage over $700 million in payments annually, cover 130 countries, and span 5,000 workflows.
Embrace the future of enterprise productivity
AI adoption sparks rapid organizational change and value creation for business stakeholders. It enhances productivity, operational efficiency, and strategic decision-making. Companies leveraging AI see substantial improvements across their operations, from supply chain management to R&D. By integrating AI into your core business processes, you can achieve breakthrough levels of productivity and growth.
