There are two major misconceptions about AI, according to Paul Griggs, PwC senior partner and US CEO.

The first: AI is not fundamentally a technological transformation. Griggs told Business Insider that companies that think about AI adoption in this way will continue to “beat themselves up” with that mentality.

He said these companies tend to limit this work within the CIO or CTO role and that these organizations are “just missing the opportunity,” he said.

Instead, companies should think of AI as a “large-scale business transformation,” Griggs said. “It is an exercise in change management with all its people and all its processes.”

Griggs, who started at the Big Four consulting giant as an intern about 30 years ago, said he sees AI as the “biggest opportunity” of his career, and there is no doubt it will improve productivity. The real question is what companies should do about this.

“The lazy answer is to just push it to the bottom,” Griggs said, adding that “the hardest question we have to ask ourselves is: Where is the opportunity and potential for growth in my business? Am I willing to deploy that AI dividend on those growth opportunities?”

The second mistake is believing that AI alone can fix a broken business. If companies add AI to inefficient processes, Griggs said, they will simply end up with a more complicated AI-powered process.

“If you put it on top of messy processes, all the AI ​​will do for you is tell you how bad your messy process really is,” Griggs said.

Instead, companies need to rebuild their processes and should view AI as an “end-to-end” transformation. He added that companies need to interact with customers, build relationships and create new opportunities.

That includes looking at a given workflow to determine where it makes sense to implement technology within it, Griggs said.