The Journal's Ray A. Smith covers the third year of the Wharton/GBK enterprise AI study, co-authored by our founder Jeremy Korst. The question it set out to answer, whether companies can actually put generative AI to good use, now has data behind it. For organizations that have moved past experimentation, the answer is increasingly yes.
The data backs a real shift from experimentation to returns: most executives now say their company formally measures AI's ROI, and roughly three in four report positive returns. The study's co-author Stefano Puntoni names the catch in the Journal: adopting AI fast, with no vision or strategy behind it, doesn't compound into growth.
This is the Strategic Fork in the Journal's pages. Efficiency use is becoming table stakes; the separation comes from leaders who treat AI as an accelerant for the strategy they already have, not a pile of pilots to be counted.
So what: "Are we using AI?" is the wrong scorecard. "Is it moving the numbers that matter?" is the one the leaders in this survey can answer.