TOP INSIGHT
The state of AI in 2020: Global Survey on artificial intelligence
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey’s Global Survey on AI suggests that organisations are using AI as a tool for generating value, primarily in the form of revenues.
A small contingent of respondents coming from a variety of industries attribute 20% or more of their organisations’ earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to AI. These companies plan to invest even more in AI in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its acceleration of all things digital.
This could create a wider divide between AI leaders and the majority of companies still struggling to capitalise on the technology; however, these leaders engage in a number of practices that could offer helpful hints for success.
FURTHER INSIGHTS
Why a blended workforce may be key to lasting competitive advantage
Harvard Business School
Companies are increasingly blending full-time staff with skilled on-demand talent. However, few companies have developed cultures that accommodate gig working.
To be successful in this endeavour, companies need to identify a senior executive to champion such a transformation. Businesses that have made the shift to a blended workforce have done so with the explicit endorsement and support from the C-Suite.
This executive should have both the authority and the credibility to break with old practices and embrace affordable, innovative solutions to their company’s skills deficits.
Agile marketing values for CMOs
Strategy + Business
CMOs are accustomed to feeling pressure to validate their effectiveness. Now, many are being asked to do so with fewer human and financial resources. In response, marketing teams, many of which have flirted with agile marketing principles in recent years, should fast-track their agile efforts and insist that their agencies and other partners do so, too. Agile marketing has five core values:
- Validated learning over opinions and conventions
- Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
- Adaptive and iterative campaigns over one-shot, “big bang” campaigns
- Process of discovery over static prediction
- Many small experiments over a few large bets.
