A major insurer used to rely on its Thanks to the organization’s increased employees to manually administer investment in AI-savvy talent, its business claims—a tedious process that cost department now receives new, AI- over $500 million annually—even powered apps within five months of before the firm’s billion-dollar payouts to initiating their development—compared policyholders. The company explored with an 18-month wait, on average, before native cloud-storage systems and AI the digital factory was built. More broadly, more aggressively, with the goal to store, by 2025, the company expects its digital analyze and track images and other factory to boost its bottom line by $1.5 unstructured data to support claims billion annually. processing. By industrializing its AI tools and teams, the company targeted To strengthen their AI cores, Achievers efficiency gains of 5% in its first year alone, often collaborate with external experts with longer-term cost savings of more to stay on top of of breakthroughs in than $100 million annually. science and engineering. In 2020, for example, American Express partnered A European energy company created with the Indian Institute of Technology a digital factory to help empower Madras to create a Data Analytics, Risk and employees to use analytics and AI-driven Technology laboratory at the prestigious 6 insights in their daily jobs. Among other university. Such innovation ecosystems initiatives, the digital factory trains field help Achievers develop AI apps tailored engineers to work with, and improve, specifically to their needs. machine learning models. The factory also provides mandatory data and AI training to all managers, as well as reskilling and upskilling support to the firm’s entire workforce. The art of AI maturity—Advancing from practice to performance 24