Covid-era digitization moved faster than anyone expected. According to research from McKinsey, surveyed companies "accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years" in just a few months during the pandemic. This left many midsize companies with systems to stabilize, data to reconcile and processes to simplify. Even now, years of technology investments still await measurable returns. Generative AI was expected to become the next major technology wave, but it arrived before many organizations had realized returns from their earlier transformation efforts.
For midsize businesses, access to AI tools is no longer the limiting factor. The challenge is deciding which business problems should be prioritized first so that AI delivers measurable revenue growth, productivity gains, operational visibility or risk reduction within months rather than years.
