How AI Is Helping Companies Redesign Processes

The idea of business process reengineering is making a comeback, this time driven by artificial intelligence (AI). In the 1990s, the implementation of enterprise resource planning systems and the internet allowed companies to make changes to broad business processes, but the expectations of the radical changes hoped for were often unfulfilled. However, AI enables better, faster and more automated decisions, allowing companies to improve efficiency and produce better outcomes. Companies — from banks to industrial firms — are already using AI to transform their processes.

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In the 1990s, business process reengineering was all the rage: Companies used budding technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the internet to enact radical changes to broad, end-to-end business processes. Buoyed by reengineering’s academic and consulting proponents, companies anticipated transformative changes to broad processes like order-to-cash and conception to commercialization of new products.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s AI practice. He is a coauthor of All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).

Matthias Holweg is the American Standard Companies Professor of Operations Management at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at the Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University.

Dan Jeavons is the Vice President for Computational Science and Digital Innovation at Shell. He has played a key role in scaling digital and data science technology across Shell’s businesses, and has led the multi award-winning Data Science Centre of Excellence since its inception in 2013. He is based in Bangalore.