Artificial intelligence has been deeply woven into the technology infrastructure at Papa John’s for about half a decade, ranging from fraud detection to AI-enabled algorithms that share with customers when their pizzas will be delivered to their homes.
But what has changed at the restaurant chain is the frequency in which AI-enabled projects arise. And while there’s been an acceleration in the allure of AI, not every idea is worth investing in.
“For a company the size of Papa John’s, it’s not prudent to spend lots and lots of money” on AI, says Papa John’s chief technology officer, Justin Falciola.
All six tech executives Fortune interviewed for this story said their organizations intend to spend more on AI in 2024. Chief technology and chief information officers play a key role in evaluating the use cases for AI, often presented by the tech team itself or other business managers across the organization, and determining which efforts should be prioritized. And with generative AI projected to add as much as $4.4 trillion in value annually, the sky feels like the limit to the transformative power of AI.
Papa John’s is exploring AI in a few ways, including AI-enabled robotics and voice automation for customer calls; the latter has reached more than 100 locations in testing. The bots were good at handling repeat orders, but less successful at figuring out the balance of offering discounts to help lock in a sale. If the discounts get too generous, Papa John’s would see a great conversion rate but profits would suffer.
“We're trying to get the kind of cost, customer experience, and order level profit equation right before we expand,” says Falciola.
Graphic design platform Canva started to see more visual manifestations of AI about four years ago. It acquired Kaleido, which created an AI-based background removal tool for images, and has served as the backbone of the integration of more AI features that Canva has developed. Other AI-enabled tools that Canva has launched include a text-to-image writing assistant and image generating apps.
“We see 2024 has been a huge year for increasing productivity, getting people comfortable interacting with it, and finding the real use cases that they can use AI for no matter what they're doing,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer.
As he looks ahead, Adams says AI remains in an exploratory phase where people still need to figure out how they can interact with the technology and expose themselves to the power of it. Humans, he believes, will serve a key role in sharing input for creative projects and guide the final assets, even if AI helps move things along at a faster speed.
“We view AI as a creative partner, and that’s how we frame the experience that we’re giving people,” says Adams. “It’s not something that goes from zero and creates the final product.”
Real estate service firm Cushman & Wakefield says AI is a component of the company’s digital transformation journey that started in 2017. That’s manifested in advances like AI+, which Cushman & Wakefield unveiled in November, to embed AI across the commercial real estate transaction lifecycle.
Following the generative-AI boom, employee interest in AI became broader than other tech advancements. In response, Cushman & Wakefield formulated a “holistic strategy on how we wanted to level up our existing digital transformation and incorporate AI at every intersection of the digital workflow within commercial real estate,” says CIO Sal Companieh.
An AI task force helped educate Cushman & Wakefield’s workforce and ensures that AI is deployed responsibly. Meanwhile, a global emerging technology hub is a trusted internal resource that helps evaluate each AI use case, the intersection of responsible and secure AI, and put each product through a vendor risk assessment.
“We’re not impeding the transition, but we're just there to put the guardrails and partnerships to make sure that from a scalability point, the platforms they were evaluating are genuinely enterprise-grade and scalable and from a security perspective, making sure that they're protecting our colleague and client data at all times,” says Companieh.
When presented with new AI use cases from business leaders across the organization—ranging from HR to legal to communications—CTOs and CIOs say it is best for technology leaders to be looped into conversations as early as possible.
“Day one is really when we like to be involved,” says Morningstar CTO James Rhodes. “I like to recommend that you don't bring just one idea as to where you want to leverage the technology. Bring a few and then let's have a discussion.”
The financial services company says it is often asked if AI will be a friend or foe to financial advisors. AI is already being used today by human advisors to automate certain tasks and for data collection. Morningstar anticipates more AI tools will be deployed in the years to come because there is so much value with the technology, and efficiency gains can help advisors spend more time with their clients.
In May, Morningstar launched Mo, an AI chatbot that pairs the company’s investment research library with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service to summarize insights to investors.
“It’s more like a research assistant that can help our clients better navigate the content and data that we produce, in a reliable and trustworthy way,” says Rhodes.
Consulting firm McKinsey says CTOs can look at AI to accelerate the reduction of technical debt, which can account for 20% to 40% of technology budgets. What could that look like? Take the example of a legacy application that needs to be rewritten with modern code. Even if 25% of that code was written by generative AI, it would help reduce the effort and cost of that technical debt.
“This is a lever to kind of increase the speed at which technical debt is paid off and move to more modern architectures and modern applications,” says ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi.
ServiceNow says it is working to become an “AI-first company,” and to do that, it is equipping the software firm’s workforce to embrace AI. Every department has been mandated to have an AI strategy for 2024. And the company has already deployed well over a dozen generative-AI use cases internally.
Prioritization is a challenge, says Chris Bedi, but “as a business leader, you’ve got to rely on how you’ve been prioritizing things for years. What is most important to the company right now?” Looking forward, he says ServiceNow will remain bullish on AI because every investment it has made in generative AI has had a material return.
“It absolutely makes sense to shift dollars here, because we are going to get a higher return rate,” says Chris Bedi.
“We have a ton of use cases and a ton of ideas that we're investing in,” says Snowflake CIO Sunny Bedi. “But if you think of the overall narrative, it's actually productivity.”
Take the example of customer contracts. Snowflake has over 8,000 customers and each one has their own custom contract, which can start with 40 pages but become as large as 400 pages as the relationship progresses. Snowflake is currently testing an AI solution it hopes to bring to the market this year called Document AI, which leverages large language models that would help customers extract the content they need from the dense pile of documents that contain a lot of unique data.
Sunny Bedi says that while Snowflake does intend to continue to invest more in AI in the years to come, it has to be more prudent than larger tech giants that have bigger budgets. The greatest priorities are on use cases like Document AI, which intersects Snowflake’s ongoing product strategy with a tech problem that the company says hasn’t been solved yet.
“We're trying to prioritize what makes sense and how that actually intersects with our product offerings,” says Sunny Bedi. “We’ve been very deliberate about deprioritizing things where we don’t see the real value or the [return on investment] is not well defined.”
