Supercharging transformation through AI

There’s been a lot of experimentation and investment in artificial intelligence over the past few years. 2025 is all about the pay off and a refocus on augmented intelligence with a synchronised approach to the AI deployed.

AI and tech will continue to play a critical role in transformation and opportunities for growth. What C-suite executives need to focus on now is a strategic approach to get the real payoff from their investment and generate the value artificial intelligence can deliver. 

I certainly wasn’t surprised to see transformation through IT and technology being the top priority for leaders again this year, but the validation reinforces its importance for businesses and their leaders looking for opportunities to grow. In AI, and generative AI specifically, we’ve seen a lot of experimentation over the last 12 to 24 months but we need to see the translation of that experimentation into practical applications and real use cases that generate business value. This is entirely possible, but it can’t just be consultants and suppliers like us that are pushing that. It’s got to be the business leaders experiencing and seeing the translation of that investment into specific transformational change. 

What businesses need most now, and something that our organisation is entirely focused on, is better information, insight and decision-making intelligence to figure out how to navigate uncertainty, make the right choice and use data with confidence. 

The approach to deliver valuable transformational change 

Starting from the problem and working backwards is key to any transformational change – this is not new, but it hasn’t really been the approach the majority of organisations have taken in the rush to adoption. In the last year or two, we’ve seen a shift towards businesses jumping to invest in AI without necessarily knowing what problems they were trying to solve. It’s been viewed as a solution that can look for problems and that isn’t always the right way of approaching it to get the best result.

Consultants can be great at helping you figure out the fundamental business issues you’re trying to solve and how to map what’s out there to unlock the value. Partnership collaborations can deliver even more benefits at an earlier stage with innovative, technology-driven companies. 

For businesses, all of this begins with an increased focus on AI literacy and on upskilling your people to know how to use these tools more effectively. We often say to our clients, it’s not the technology that’s going to take people’s jobs, but it may be people who know how to use the technology. So how should we think about augmenting our workforce, upskilling them, giving them an opportunity for development and creating better skills – how do we supercharge them? 

I’m a big believer in this phrase ‘augmented intelligence,' rather than artificial intelligence. I’ve been pushing that for a long time, because I believe these things can, and should, work symbiotically. These technologies should become a natural extension of our workforces. This has to start, in my opinion, top down with the CEO, the C-suite and the board, perhaps also educating themselves about this technology and then leading from the front in regard to adoption and implementation. 

Beyond generative AI 

We’ve been speaking a lot to our customers about not becoming fixated on any one specific type of technology. In the last two years generative AI has become the latest craze – in Q2 2024, 50% of Fortune 500 companies mentioned generative AI in their earnings calls. Everyone’s talking about it, but this is just one option. Broadly speaking, in the world of machine learning, there are 22 main families that exist. 

At Signal AI, we’ve taken a more synchronised approach to combine generative AI with discriminative AI technology to accurately retrieve the right information and deliver the answer (or ‘signal’) from the noise. We then deploy generative AI to summarise those signals and synthesise the data in a way that a decision maker can interact with it intuitively and with confidence. 

Being able to accurately tell what something is or isn’t from a pattern recognition perspective, is extremely useful for information retrieval and for finding the right documents or data points in intelligence. Generative AI is really good for drafting new information or producing new content, helping to be a critical thought partner, but neither on their own are an elixir. Given the challenges we’ve seen with hallucinations, production of misinformation, and ethical concerns around quality and accuracy, leaders must seriously consider which technology to use or be smarter and use them in harmony. 

One of the things we’re experimenting with is a new field of AI called Causal AI. It’s neither discriminative nor generative. Causal AI is all about finding causal links and relationships between different data sets. This is the beginnings of creating more predictive models and I think this is going to be one of the new frontiers of the technology – predictive intelligence. 

Leaders and their organisations have all of this knowledge and data, all of this human capital and expertise within the business. The combination of causal AI with discriminative and generative AI would supercharge their transformation strategies to get ahead of competitors in a more pre-emptive way. It’s certainly not as hot or well-known as the likes of ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions right now, but it could be applied powerfully into this world of business, information and intelligence for C-suite executives to extract the real value in transformational technology. I think this is going to be a fascinating trend and opportunity to track.

David Benigson is the CEO of Signal AI, pioneering the intersection of artificial intelligence and media intelligence. With a track record in technology and entrepreneurship, he leads Signal AI’s mission to transform how businesses make informed decisions through data-driven insights. Under his leadership, Signal AI has flourished from one of the fastest growing start-ups to a global leader in advanced AI solutions, revolutionising how organisations analyse and leverage information for strategic advantage.