MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Catching Up Fast by Driving Value From AI

Some organizations may feel that acquiring AI capabilities is a race, and if a company starts late, it can never catch up.

That notion is belied by Scotiabank (officially the Bank of Nova Scotia), which has pursued a results-oriented approach to artificial intelligence over the past two years. While some of its resources are devoted to exploring how new technologies — including blockchain and quantum computing — might drive fresh business models and products, the great majority of its data and AI work is focused on improving operations today rather than incubating for the future.

About the Author

Thomas H. Davenport (@tdav) is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a visiting professor at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Randy Bean (@randybeannvp) is founder and CEO of NewVantage Partners, a strategic advisory company that is now a division of Wavestone, a global consultancy based in Paris. He is the author of Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI (Wiley, 2021).