‘Close to zero’: 4 AI chiefs say no companies have truly changed in response to AI—blame ‘politics projects’

D Few large organizations have rebuilt their core operations around artificial intelligence, according to the technology chief of one of the world’s largest consulting firms.

He also said companies shouldn’t yet spend much energy on assigning blame when AI projects go wrong.

The number of large enterprises or government processes “that have been really, truly reinvented with AI at the absolute core is basically close to zero,” Marc Warner, Accenture’s global chief technology officer, said during a Fortune Brainstorm AI virtual event.

Accenture is a founding partner of Brainstorm AI and sponsored the event.

Warner and three other executives spoke with Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn about why many companies report little return from AI despite wide use.

The other panelists were Matthieu Caillat of AXA , Greg Ulrich of Mastercard and Marjorie Janiewicz of Mistral AI.

Their answers pointed less to software than to organizational change.

Edges versus core Warner said most companies have put AI in peripheral work such as marketing, meeting notes and transcription.

Coding is “perhaps a little different,” because returns there can be measured.

Changing the economics of an industry, he said, means targeting core business processes, which are risky.

He compared the moment to early factories that used electricity only for lighting, before redesigning production around electric motors.

Ulrich said the biggest returns come from redesigning whole workflows, not layering AI onto existing ones.

He said Mastercard’s product development lifecycle is “very, very advanced” in redesigning its product development lifecycle, with smaller teams and faster turnaround.

He also described a trap: speed up one step in an 80-step process and the next step simply develops a backlog.