AI is everywhere—but is it actually benefiting businesses? The numbers are certainly impressive: In a 2024 McKinsey survey about AI, 78 percent of respondents said their organizations use it in at least one business function‚ up from 55% the year before. Walk through any tech conference and the section for AI vendors gets bigger every year. Yet behind the growth and excitement is a more complex and sobering reality.
Early innovators get a lot of press and attention, leading to a sense of panic among competitors and customers that they’re falling behind by not offering their own solutions or integrating AI immediately. The result: a lot of undifferentiated offerings on the market and half-baked implementations that offer little or no business value.
AI certainly can be a game-changer, powering enhanced efficiency, deeper insights, and increased scalability across a range of business operations. But whether those products and services support real-world organizational needs, and whether businesses are integrating them effectively into their tech stacks, is another question. Many companies may not even need many AI-powered features, but they feel pressure to implement them without making a strong business case or analyzing their use strategically first.
At the same time, people are embracing AI tools on their own for their work, using everything from ChatGPT to Copilot to Grammarly (which can lead to issues regarding data privacy and intellectual property). The advantages of AI are clear—but organizations must carefully think through their implementation or risk expensive disappointment.
Shifts in the Tech Workforce
AI has significant, long-term strategic implications for the workforce and, by extension, productivity, innovation, and costs. AI integrations can require reevaluation and realignment of internal systems, setting off a cascade of changes that can drive up costs and impact productivity for months.
The other obvious concern in this area is about AI replacing humans: The CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, recently said that AI will erase 50% of entry-level jobs in the next five years. But for smart organizations, the question will not be who to get rid of but how to elevate existing employees to handle higher-level tasks and let AI take care of more routine and entry-level responsibilities.
I suspect this will lead to fewer jobs in the tech industry as people choose to go into other fields instead of competing with AI for those entry-level positions. In the U.S., cheaper and plentiful overseas labor, especially in India, will probably fill any remaining roles in that tier.
However, over 40% of business owners are concerned that AI can lead to an overdependence on technology. What happens if tech fails and there aren’t enough employees with the skills or capacity to take over its tasks, even temporarily? I am also worried about what happens when humans are used to being fed information or having machines do everything for us. When I was a kid, I remembered a bunch of phone numbers—but now I don’t know anyone’s digits since they’re all in my phone. When we outsource tasks to technology, the specifics of those skills get lost. When we outsource tasks to technology, we may become more productive, but we also risk becoming cognitively disengaged as our skills atrophy.
As AI capabilities expand, data is poised to become an organization’s most expensive asset—potentially surpassing even the costs of a maintaining a human workforce. This will impact events like mergers and acquisitions as every organization develops proprietary datasets and other valuable intellectual property. Overall, the accuracy and scalability that AI offers may justify those costs, but the jury is still out on whether the economics will actually work in practice.
Reality Check: Making AI Work for You
Effective AI use requires time, context, training, and human oversight. Organizations must carefully consider its capabilities, where it makes the most sense to implement it for maximum efficiency and to reach business goals, and incorporate processes to check that it is working as designed.
In cybersecurity, AI can be particularly valuable for tasks like investigating alerts and informing clients of any escalated issues. This involves teaching it to ask specific questions to evaluate a threat, saving employees the time of digging up data manually and reducing the incidence of false positives—all of which can speed up response times and give humans more time to focus on actual threats and higher-level issues, improving customer service overall.
There’s also the question of who is overseeing AI and what data it is using. Companies need to be smart about evaluating vendors to make sure product features, and the data the solutions uses, align with organizational needs and expectations. After all, if an AI is learning from Stephen King novels, you’ll be very disappointed if you’re expecting it to give you Shakespeare.
Overall, AI should support human productivity and innovation — not replace it.
Going Beyond the Buzz
AI is a tool, not a strategy. Success comes from balanced integration: machine-fed, human-led. This takes some time and effort to figure out. Companies that simply eliminate roles first and expect AI to pick up the slack are setting themselves up for a potentially painful lesson.
For AI vendors, the same advice applies. I firmly believe that technology businesses want to put out a quality product—but that’s hard to do if you are only trying to keep up with competitors. Take time and be thoughtful about your offerings, and the chances of producing something of value are higher. Remember: Apple didn’t bring the first smartphone to the market, but the company introduced the first touchscreen and an operating system that revolutionized how we interact with our devices. Whether you’re implementing AI or building it, success comes from focusing on substance instead of speed. In the long run, getting it right is more important than getting there first.
About Jake Bice
Jake Bice is the Director of Threat Defense Services at Fortified Health Security. In this pivotal role, Bice is responsible for the strategic oversight of the Security Operations Center, assessing and resolving client needs, training teams, and refining the processes that underpin service delivery to clients.
