At the WSJ Technology Council Summit tech leaders made a bold but necessary point: we’re measuring AI’s impact the wrong way.
Counting minutes saved, code written, or cost cut may feel safe, but they’re just proxies. They don’t reflect the outcomes leaders truly care about.
The real value of AI isn’t productivity hacks. It’s transformation.
🔑 Pick a few high-potential projects
🔑 Build the structures to scale them
🔑 Use AI to reinvent how business, and marketing, creates value
This breaks the old tech adoption playbook of proving short-term wins, then shaping decisions, then evolving models. With AI, the biggest impact only shows up at scale.
🔥 Marketers: the trap is real. Faster copy, cheaper creative, automated targeting — that’s table stakes, not transformation. The advantage lies in using AI to redefine customer understanding, trust, and growth models.
💡 The real question isn’t “What’s the ROI of this pilot?” It’s: “Which AI bets are worth scaling — and how do we reshape the business to capture their full value?”
👉 Is ROI obsession blinding us to AI’s real potential?
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🚨 ROI Is the Wrong Question for AI
