These companies are rolling up their sleeves to implement AI

The economic gains it promises to unlock are almost unimaginable, so there is no more urgent task for leaders than to roll up their sleeves and get going.

But many find it daunting to deal with the onslaught of new and ever-changing tools and large language models (LLMs). For many companies, early experiments have proven to be costly investments and mediocre gains.

A recent IBM survey of 2,000 global CEOs found that while executives remain convinced that AI is essential to their future, only 25% of their current AI initiatives have generated the expected returns on investment.

Yet, across all sectors, some companies are starting to realize this. FortuneThe newsroom decided to collect examples of AI implementations that show promising benefits, in a special new digital issue that is part of the series we call Fortune AIQ, made possible by our partner ServiceNow.

On Wall Street, for example, JPMorgan Chase says its internal AI use cases have unlocked an estimated $2 billion in value. The 240-year-old bank BNY has also embraced AI, launching an internal tool called Eliza to help its employees create their own AI agents, and it is partnering with OpenAI to collaborate on financial services use cases.

Other Fortune 500 companies are creating AI avatars to facilitate corporate training initiatives and even to mimic executive communications so they can produce them more frequently. Mondelez International said it has made 30,000 such videos this year, with help from an AI avatar startup backed by Mark Cuban.

In the $104 billion waste management industry, AI can even help us recycle more efficiently. AMP, which makes an AI-driven system that sorts waste from recycling (something humans are notoriously bad at), helps companies reduce the costs of this tedious work by up to 50%, making recycling potentially profitable.

The bottom line: Understanding AI can be intimidating, but it’s a business imperative.

As IBM vice president Gary Cohn said of his investigation into the ROI of AI, “the ultimate gain will only accrue to CEOs with the courage to embrace risk as opportunity.”