AI for the chief operating officer: Leveraging innovation to elevate AI in operations

With AI rapidly reshaping the operations landscape, COOs are becoming increasingly focused on deploying emerging AI technologies to navigate complexities, optimize performance and drive future growth. The primary goal is to tie AI initiatives to an effective return on investment.

For example, rapidly advancing agentic AI solutions that can act autonomously, make decisions and take actions without constant human intervention or oversight are changing the way companies work. Agentic AI solutions work as digital employees and can understand plain English instructions to perform more complex processes and create critical documentation for purposes such as audits and compliance. In addition, AI agents appear empathetic and bring human-in-the-loop decision-making capabilities. As a result, firms leveraging agentic AI strategies have reported an average ROI of $3.7 per dollar, rising as high as $10 to $12 in select use cases.

“There are billions of dollars that are being invested by the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft and Google into making these AI tools more accessible and scalable,” says Venkateswaran. “And the best part of integrating agentic AI is that it works round the clock with zero fatigue and continuously learns and adapts at minimal costs.”

To enhance and optimize enterprise operations, COOs can leverage AI in three key functional areas tied to ROI metrics in growth, cost optimization and risk mitigation respectively:

“AI helps by saving huge amounts of time and adding value to overall business planning and scaling,” says Beyer. “When you train an AI model for specific business needs like customer service documentation or creating service tickets, you are able to resolve new and incoming queries from customers, integrate with different systems across the organization to actually resolve the challenges that they have and add value to your business and gain a competitive edge.”

Despite the potential for significant ROI and technological advancements within operations, some hesitation over deploying AI remains as the use cases and implementation risks are unclear to some companies. In addition, many firms believe they lack the internal skill and knowledge required to successfully leverage AI tools and require guidance to fully analyze and determine how AI applies to their organization in a practical way with proper governance and minimal disruption.

RSM’s AI survey found that 88% feel generative AI’s impact has exceeded their expectations and yet 62% said it has been harder to implement than expected. In addition, of executives that experienced challenges with implementation, 35% reported concerns about data privacy and security, and 32% noted insufficient internal skills and expertise, further pushing organizations to be hesitant about pursuing these technical advancements.

Data governance presents another critical issue. Any AI-driven output is directly linked to the quality of input data. Data compliance, data quality and due diligence are common concerns within many businesses, but they are crucial elements to focus on before making any AI investment decisions.

It is evident that business operations have massive potential for significant optimization and improvement through AI solutions. COOs can incorporate AI-driven strategies to run, protect and automate processes across functions, driving substantial value and ROI.

“We are at the center of a massive transformation with generative AI and agentic AI, an evolution from the way we have perceived businesses so far,” says Venkateswaran. “What this means for COOs and other C-suite leaders is that the development lifecycle which used to take years, now takes weeks, if not days. An idea that would originally have been deprioritized for effort and expense is now a viable experiment. That is truly why we believe this to be the AI moment for organizations.”

Despite these opportunities, significant challenges to digital transformation and AI integration remain. Cost optimization and collaborating with other executives to protect and grow the firm continue to be major concerns.

“When COOs work with some of their executive counterparts across the organization to protect the firm from a risk perspective and grow the business, they need to collaborate to design an AI vision and work toward driving significant ROI,” says Beyer.

But when that vision comes together, it can have a significant positive result on overall business operations.

“Leveraging AI tools to generate predictive and prescriptive insights enables you to make informed decisions, leading to enterprise intelligence,” says Beyer. “This is one of the Holy Grails that firms are realizing today.”