AI will transform the enterprise ‘in a generation,’ say CDOs

Despite the many concerns around generative AI, businesses are continuing to explore the technology and put it into production, the 2025 AI and Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey revealed.

Generative AI is increasingly being put into production, survey author Randy Bean and Tom Davenport, professor of IT and management at Babson College, observed in this year‘s study. Last year, only 5% of respondents said they had put the technology into production at scale; this year 24% have done so. Early-stage production has also increased, from 25% to 47%. Only 29% are still just experimenting with generative AI, versus 70% in the 2024 study.

The study examined AI and generative AI usage in 125 Fortune 1000 organizations. Chief data officers (CDOs), chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs), and chief artificial intelligence officers (CAIO) together made up 91% of survey respondents; 4% held the title of CIO or CTO, and 3% were C-suite execuitves. Most (85%) were in North America.

These data and AI leaders, Bean and Davenport concluded, are positive about generative AI’s business value, with most — 58% — feeling that the primary value is coming from productivity gains or efficiencies.

And despite acknowledging business threats posed by AI, including the spread of disinformation or misinformation (53.2%), ethical bias (19.8%), and job loss or displacement (4.8%), 96.6% of those surveyed view the overall impact of AI as beneficial.

Who runs AI?

As for the role a CIO should play in running AI, Bean said in interview with CIO that “this is where Tom and I may have a little bit of variance in perspective.”

There is, he said, a real divergence in organizations as to whether an AI initiative “sits on the business side or the technology side. I mean, historically, it sat on the technology side, but there’s been a progression, a migration to more and more data and AI leaders sitting on the business side of it. Personally, I believe it should sit on the business side.”

“[We have] a difference of opinion because he thinks ‘oh, the data person should be a business person, and not report to the CIO,’” Davenport said. “If a CIO is quite focused on business transformation, I think that it’s far better to have all these subsidiary functions reporting to him or her.”

But, he added, “if you’re the head of marketing or something, you have a technology initiative you want, and there are four or five different tech leaders that you have to go to figure out how to get done, what you need to get done, that’s very frustrating, I think, and leads to a whole variety of problems.”

Survey respondents were equally divided, with 36.3% reporting that data and AI operations report to the business, 47.2% saying technology leadership holds the reins, and 16.5% saying they have other reporting relationships, such as to transformation leadership.

What’s the business value?

The survey also found that few companies are measuring productivity gains from AI carefully. Bean said he was not surprised, due to the fact “that 90% of Fortune 1000 companies are legacy companies, meaning they’re basically a generation or older. Those companies tend to be more cautious and risk averse due to large customer franchises built over generations or even centuries or more.”

He added, “in spite all of the enthusiasm I was hearing in the industry, whenever I met with the chief data officers, the chief AI officers, or any of these companies, to a person, they pretty much said, ‘you know, we’re at an early stage.’”

Asked if anything from this year’s survey surprised him, Davenport said that last year, generative AI “really seemed to be responsible for huge changes in the data cultures of organization, almost a doubling, or more than a doubling, actually, in the percentage of companies that said that ‘we’re data driven, we have a data driven culture.’ That fell back to about half of the increase this year. I think what it starts to suggest is generative AI, by itself, is not going to single handedly transform the data culture of organizations.”

The report noted that data and AI leaders surveyed are “also positive about genAI’s business value. Almost half, 46%, say that the business value is either already high or significant and growing; another 32% say it is ‘modest but increasing. Most — 58% — feel that the primary value is coming from “exponential productivity gains or efficiencies.”

However, the authors noted in an article about the results published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “companies shouldn’t take such confidence on faith. Very few companies are actually measuring productivity gains carefully or figuring out what the liberated knowledge workers are doing with their freed-up time. Only a few academic studies have measured genAI productivity gains, and when they have, they’ve generally found some improvements, but not exponential ones.”

There are still data and AI leadership challenges to deal with too. The report noted that the CDO role continues “to be very much a work in progress as organizational data and AI needs rapidly evolve. The CDO role is characterized by high turnover, short tenures and not being well understood. While CDOs face headwinds as organizational change agents, most believe that the role is evolving in the right direction.”

But despite these challenges, the report said, “most organizations [89%] believe that AI will be the transformational technology in a generation, akin to the internet.”