Corporate Perspectives: ROI On AI

Executives, these days, have a big mandate. They have to figure out how to lead a business through an age that really exemplifies the idea of uncharted waters. Never have we ever had anything like this, and C-suite people are sitting up and taking notice.

I wanted to lay out some of what I heard as I sat in on a panel discussion in September, at the Imagination in Action event The Next Endeavor (disclaimer: I help to put on these events with IIA), where an esteemed group of business people with skin in the game discussed imperatives for today. Ankur Gaba of Deloitte moderated the talk with Rama Akkiraju of NVIDIA, Srini Namineni of Cisco, Satya Jaydev of SanDisk and Nishit Sahay of Marvell Technology. The result, I think, says a lot about, well, corporate strategy writ large.

Gaba opened, noting that an estimated 25% of organizations have now moved about 40% of AI use cases from sandboxing to production.

Where, he asked, do we see the big gains?

“One is, of course, our chip design,” Akkiraju said. “Chip design and verification testing is at the heart of what Nvidia does … our software coding is completely done with coding tools like Claude code, Codex and Cursor. You name it, we have it, and the entire enterprise, data access systems, have been connected to those systems with the model context protocols, and skills, and everything … so all engineers in the company, of course, now, are coding with that.”

She also mentioned supply chain.

“There’s also demand and supply planning, and scenario analysis, and all of those things are also things that are in production … cybersecurity, code vulnerability, systems vulnerability … agents are everywhere, in all business functions, including IT, employee productivity, or personal assistance, and digital assistance team assistance, they’re all there, deployed across the company.”

Namineni similarly noted success across multiple business domains.

He gave an example:

More Talk

He mentioned another thing.

He said this about autonomy: