“It is the time when businesses not only adopt AI but also operationalize it, to realize AI’s potential truly”, told Jeff Schumacher, the CEO of NAX Group, an AI software company to WEF.

Not just Schumacher, but other business leaders also believe AI has the potential to transform their business when implemented properly. From data-driven decision-making to automating several business operations, AI can make organizations gain high productivity and efficiency. This is why more than 75% of organizations are currently using AI in some form of other, as reported by Statista.

In this article, we will discuss some of the various ways business leaders are transforming themselves into AI leaders by integrating advanced and innovative AI solutions into their business functions to enhance their productivity, gain competitive advantage, and enhance customer experience.

We will also discuss how you can leverage top AI leadership certifications to gain essential skills and knowledge to define business strategy and integrate AI into your organization.

AI-Powered Decisions Transforming Business

Gonzalo Gortazar, the CEO of CaixaBank told IBM that even though making decisions based on past experience, common sense, intuition, or gut feeling is a good method and should be preserved, but providing more analytical support for decision-making is always better and helpful.

Even Bret Greenstein, a renowned data and AI leader from PwC, who is actively involved in implementing enterprise AI operationally across various organizations believes leaders are embracing this transformation, especially generative AI for its disruptive potential.

He adds he can see organizations readily investing in generative AI technology to transform every business operation possible and reap its benefits, from cost savings to increased revenue, and faster operations to new value streams.

Though a lot of business leaders have adopted it, they are still unaware of its potential and only a few of them realize its true power in business decision-making.

For example, he said, firstly generative AI can easily summarize public and private data to get answers for senior executives, and on top of that, they can ask questions related to their finances and operations without relying on dashboards or reports for their answer.

Making Customer Engagement More Transformative

Using AI, business leaders and AI leaders can gain real-time data and insights. This helps them to understand their customers better. Thus, they can confidently launch new businesses catering to demand of market needs.

Kirill Lazarev is the founder and CEO of Lazarev, a design agency who serves various Fortune 100 companies including Boeing, HP, Meta, and others.

He shared his experience regarding how one of his clients was able to spot the rising trend in customer preference by using predictive analytics technology early on, and how they were able to customize offerings to their customers like never before. He realized the power of AI in bridging the decision making and gaining deeper customer insights, highlighting it as his lightbulb moment.

Since then, he has been preaching his clients to use AI for analytics and decision-making as he realizes how AI serves as a great bridge between companies and their customers and help them get better understanding of market to boost their profitability.

Process Automation and Optimization with Enhanced Customer Experience

Business leaders must analyze their business processes and find out areas where they can implement AI to automate and optimize tasks. They can use Robotics Process Automation (RPA) to automate various kinds of repetitive and rule-based tasks. Combining RPA with AI can help them create intelligent systems that can learn and improve over time.

Not just optimizing operations, AI will also help businesses to segment their customers and deliver highly targeted marketing campaigns. Moreover, with the help of AI-powered chatbots, organizations can provide their customers with 24/7 support and answer their queries.

Innovative Products and Services

AI leaders use the advanced AI technology for research which helps in faster research and development operations as they can analyze scientific resources more accurately and identify potential breakthroughs. Organizations can use generative AI techniques to generate new elements, molecules, drug discovery, etc. and develop innovative products and services.

Enhance Your AI Skills and Knowledge

Now that you understand the transformative potential of AI for your business, you must aim to gain latest AI leadership skills and knowledge to successfully strategize and implement AI into the business.

There are several AI leadership certifications and courses that will help you master the essential AI transformation skills so that you can implement it to boost your organizations productivity. Some popular certifications and courses are:

• Certified AI Transformation Leader (CAITL™) by USAII®
• Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy by MIT Sloan
• Artificial Intelligence Course Berkeley Executive Education
• Artificial Intelligence in Business: Creating Value with Machine Learning by Harvard University
• AI for Decision Making: Business Strategies and Applications by University of Pennsylvania

These are some of the widely recognized AI certifications for leaders and courses to help you advance in your AI career in 2025 as well as take your organization forward.

To sum up!

The potential of AI in business across various industries is huge. Organizations should actively adopt advanced AI technology and boost their business. At the same time, business leaders need to identify areas where AI can have greatest impact and offer higher ROI and invest strategically in efficient AI solutions. Also, they must enroll in top AI certifications for leaders and learn ways to integrate AI into their business processes including AI-powered decision making.