03/28/2025

How One Company Broadened Its Customer Base via AI

Mapping the customer journey helped the company grow

Companies have invested billions in generative AI (gen AI) and large language models (LLMs). Some now have chief AI officers. But despite the money and buzz, driving business impact cleary remains a challenge. Last May, a McKinsey article argued that “the honeymoon phase of generative AI is over.” In August, Gartner reported that generative AI was advancing through the firm’s “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” and was declining rapidly into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” In January, a Deloitte survey of 2,770 executives in 14 countries showed that organizations were still struggling to demonstrate the value of gen AI efforts. And in February, The Financial Times asked: “Generative AI is impressive, but can it be profitable?”

Yet, it is possible for gen AI to add value to companies. This article provides a framework for deploying AI in the sales function, using a case study of SAP, a leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Our goal is to demonstrate that thoughtful scaling of AI has the potential to add billions of dollars in revenue to large businesses.

Understand Market Trends

In business, value is created or destroyed in the marketplace with customers. Instead of starting with an “AI strategy,” first you must clarify what problems you want to solve or opportunities you want to capture to grow the business. Only then should you think about how AI, or any other tool, can help. When a new technology becomes popular, companies often feel pressure to adopt it, and this leads them to invert the process, hunting for use cases to justify the investment.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.