BUSINESS CXO INSIGHT PROFILE

What is your view on the explosion of AI use within organisations over the past few years?

It’ s a fundamentally new capability, so I’ m not surprised that people are running towards it and trying to figure out how to use it and how to make it useful and productive. Like a lot of new innovation, I’ m not sure most organisations are very good at using it yet, but I think we will be. It is going to be a meaningfully important technology. We’ re learning how to wire it into business processes and how to have accountability and governability around it. It’ s changing the way we do things here at Alteryx; how we write code, how we run our business, how we do analytics. It is a meaningfully new set of capabilities.

Why is there a widening gap between AI ambition and operational reality, and what can be done about this?

Part of it is that we are in this early phase. On one hand, we’ re digesting and learning how to use this new capability. We’ re changing how certain functions operate. But at the same time, there’ s all this discovery and innovation happening on the upside. Every time we feel like we’ re closing that gap a little bit, all this new capability comes out, and the gap widens again.

We’ re just in the early, high innovation phase of a brand new kind of capability. As we continue to see new capabilities roll out, we’ re going to continue to see the gap widen. And then we’ ll learn how to use those capabilities. That’ s true of a lot of technology innovation. It was true when the Internet came out. It was true when email rolled out.

Why do people not trust AI?

Well, first off, I appreciate that people don’ t trust AI. It’ s nice that we’ re sceptical a little bit when new stuff comes out, and maybe the Internet has taught us to be a little bit more sceptical. Over time, we will, and part of it is learning what it’ s good at and what it’ s not good at so you start to learn where to use things and where not to use them.

Right now, it is that Jeffrey Moore adoption curve problem, where we have the early innovators saying they can do everything with AI. We have an early majority coming over and learning to use it a little bit. But for a lot of people, it’ s still very black box. We don’ t know how it does what it does, and it doesn’ t give us the right answer all the time. It’ s perfectly happy to give us a really confident wrong answer. And most people, when you get a really confident wrong answer once or twice, you stop asking for another answer.

We’ ve got to learn as organisations how to train it, how to help it give the right answers, how to tell people where the answers came from, teach people how and when to use it. We will get over that trust gap over time.

What are your tips for businesses to ensure AI delivers measurable and scalable business impact?

This happens a lot with technology, where it starts off in the hands of the techies. And I’ m one of the techies, so it starts off in the IT-techie universe. The challenge there is, the IT techie universe doesn’ t always understand, or usually understand, the nitty gritty depths of the business. For example, how a company manages their tax and audit process is not something most people in the IT department spend a lot of time understanding. For technology to be really valuable is when it crosses over that boundary.

We’ re still treating it like a project that IT is going to do. I use the example a lot that in the early days of the Internet, most companies had a website that was entirely run by their IT team. And it didn’ t really do commerce. It didn’ t really do marketing. It www. intelligentcxo. com

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