Understanding Artificial Intelligence Diffusion through an AI Capability Maturity Model

The recent advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sparked a renewed interest in how organizations can potentially leverage and gain value from these technologies. Despite the considerable hype around AI, recent reports indicate that a very small number of organizations have managed to successfully implement these technologies in their operations. While many early studies and consultancy-based reports point to factors that enable adoption, there is a growing understanding that adoption of AI is rather more of a process of maturity. Building on this more nuanced approach of adoption, this study focuses on the diffusion of AI through a maturity lens. To explore this process, we conducted a two-phased qualitative case study to explore how organizations diffuse AI in their operations. During the first phase, we conducted interviews with AI experts to gain insight into the process of diffusion as well as some of the key challenges faced by organizations. During the second phase, we collected data from three organizations that were at different stages of AI diffusion. Based on the synthesis of the results and a cross-case analysis, we developed a capability maturity model for AI diffusion (AICMM), which was then validated and tested. The results highlight that AI diffusion introduces some common challenges along the path of diffusion as well as some ways to mitigate them. From a research perspective, our results show that there are some core tasks associated with early AI diffusion that gradually evolve as the maturity of projects grows. For professionals, we present tools for identifying the current state of maturity and providing some practical guidelines on how to further implement AI technologies in their operations to generate business value.