Defining, Measuring, and Communicating the Value of AI

Ally Financial’s AI journey illustrates how a regulated bank can innovate without sacrificing security. The company created Ally AI as a flexible translation layer that can switch between leading large‑language models, ensuring no single vendor lock‑in. Core principles—human‑in‑the‑loop, strict data residency, and continuous risk assessment—guided the first rollout to customer‑care agents, where call summaries improved from 40 % to 80 % accuracy and user acceptance reached 90 %. Six months of change‑management, legal review, and risk‑team engagement turned skeptical agents into champions, demonstrating that technology alone cannot deliver value without organizational buy‑in.

Avery Dennison approaches AI through its Digital Innovation Center of Excellence, or DICE, which aligns projects with four digital experiences and five corporate strategies. Business‑unit IT partners surface use‑case ideas, feed them into the strategic plan, and receive funding either from the annual budget or a venture‑style pool reserved for experimentation. This dual‑track model preserves top‑down governance while empowering bottom‑up creativity, allowing rapid pilots on emerging technologies such as quantum computing or generative AI. Standardized technology stacks—like the Unity platform and mandated ERP solutions—ensure consistency, while the DICE team provides the resources and oversight needed to scale successful pilots across the enterprise.

Both companies rely on finance‑driven metrics to prove AI’s bottom‑line impact. Avery Dennison’s finance team conducts post‑implementation reviews, tracking EBIT, ROI and internal‑rate‑of‑return over a five‑year horizon, and tags any project with material AI components for separate reporting. Ally Financial similarly quantifies gains by measuring efficiency improvements, risk‑score reductions, and code‑generation productivity, while also publishing open‑source safeguards through partnerships with LangChain and the Responsible AI Institute. This disciplined measurement, combined with transparent governance, gives CIOs a “trust bank” to spend on future initiatives. As AI embeds itself into SaaS platforms—projected at 80 % by 2026—such rigorous value frameworks become essential for scaling innovation responsibly.