AI use cases in Fortune 500

There has been a lot of chatter around the return on investment for the huge sums of money pouring into AI since 2023, and boy has there been a lot of money. There are obvious cases, like Nvidia, where revenue has been going up at a crazy pace with the margins to match. There are less obvious cases, like OpenAI, who might lose $5 billion this year.

So where are all the commercially impactful AI use cases?

To answer this question, I am putting together this living list of enterprise AI use cases by industry. I want to arm myself with a broad understanding of how different industries approach this opportunity, how far have they gone, and how do company leaders think about the ROI of AI.

Most companies on this list are in the Fortune 500. I have been systematically going through every company in the F500 to compile the research below. There is quite a lot of detail in earnings calls and presentations, but I have also found interviews and blog articles to be a good source of information.

In the list below, I also focus on differentiated use case that goes beyond the usual summarisation, internal knowledge search, and simple support automation use cases.

Consumer Staples

• Kraft Heinz leans on AI to add $30 million in sales. AI sales insights first aligns product, shopper, and supply chain data then uncovers real time sales opportunities. AI supply chain automatically finds risk points in the supply and alerts relevant operators.

• For Pepsi, AI helps optimise the manufacturing process, and analyze big consumer data to come up with better marketing campaigns. On the factory floor, a minute of factory downtime costs thousands of pounds. Using AI, they can check and analyse processes in real-time, warn of problems on the horizon, and harness historical data to recommend fixes. Sensors are trained on lots of audio data, so that they can detect faults like conveyor belts breaking, while analysing machine vibrations. [1] Their internal AI, Ada, helps source, sort, connect and, most importantly, leverage millions of consumer insights generated from the farthest corners of the PepsiCo world. [2]

Where we think we’ve got a lot of historical knowledge about something, can it leverage that to take us forward?
– Joe Manton (Senior director and global lead for digital R&D at Mondelez International)

• Mondelez International uses data on historical new product ideas and whether consumers like them, to help find new creative products and explore more variables around new product development. [3]

  • A sales tool recommends products that a retailer could offer on its shelves based on historical sales data, including what sells more in a particular neighbourhood.
  • Using image recognition to match a store’s product layout with a planogram that retailers have to comply with when displaying products.
  • monitor the health of cocoa trees in local plantations. “With the images we collect, we can do water and nutrient stress detection and get early warnings of pest infestations,” he said. [4]

• Amgen has 20,000 employees using an internal ChatGPT to test use cases. Generative biology uses AI to generate proteins that targets different diseases, then run predicts which designs will be safest and most effective. Analyse 300 petabytes worth of genetics data. [Link] It's R&D team is focused on a) developing new drugs faster and b) increase productivity.

• Vodafone uses AI to search and understand specific commercial terms and conditions across more than 10,000 contracts with more than 800 communications operators.

Consumer Discretionary

We have found over time that the closer you put the problem into the hands of people who deal with the problem and democratize access to GenAI, the more likely something will percolate,” he said, later adding, “It's a mind shift that you have to really incentivize and encourage. – Adrian Lopez, the corporate head of AI at Flight Centre Travel Group

• Best Buy is launching a chatbot that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions - basically automating simpler customer request and support interactions using generative AI.

• Estée Lauder uses AI to add another channel (voice, in addition to visuals) to make makeup more accessible. [Link]

• Marriott expects AI to help the hotel industry moving forward in three key areas: accelerated content generation, elevated customer experience, and augmented intelligence for employees. [Link]

• Booking.com has a new AI Trip Planner that combines existing machine learning systems with ChatGPT, so that users can receive travel recommendations based on preferences they describe in natural language. [Link]

• Alaska Airlines is making a personalized travel search experience, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content.

• IHG Hotels & Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app.

• The Home Depot has built an application called Sidekick, which helps store associates manage inventory and keep shelves stocked; notably, vision models help associates prioritize which actions to take.

• Victoria’s Secret is testing AI-powered agents to help their in-store associates find information about product availability, inventory, and fitting and sizing tips, so they can better tailor recommendations to customers.

• Belk ECommerce is using generative AI to craft better product descriptions, a necessary yet time-consuming task for digital retails that has often been done manually.

Insurance

Highlights

• Insurance policies are complex and usually spread across many many products - too many for humans to comprehend.

• Copart reduces the number of manual interactions needed to car insurance claims. AI is used to triage claims, and send personalized, automated messages to adjusters and policyholders. A tool called ProQuote helps insurance carriers make the optimal real-time decisions about total losses — when and when not to total vehicles.

• Cigna uses AI to internally recruit people for its ~4000 open positions, matching employees’ strengths, skills, duration in a certain role, and desire for growth with internal opportunities. However, Cigna is also facing a federal class action lawsuit which alleges the company used algorithms to "deny payments in batches of hundreds or thousands at a time," as part of an almost completely automated claims decision process. [Link]

• Covered California, the state’s healthcare marketplace, is using AI to automate parts of the documentation and verification process when residents apply for coverage.

• Discover Financial helps their 10,000 contact center representatives to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures during calls.

Healthcare

• TidalHealth Peninsula Regional, a 266-bed hospital in Salisbury, Maryland, moved on from a clinical decision support system that was like Wikipedia for drugs, to one that is integrated with their patient's health records, and uses Generative AI to get around limitations on keyword search. [Link]

• Megi built a virtual assistant delivered over WhatsApp to help at all stages of patients’ medical journey, automating tasks like gathering medical history, reminding patients to record measurements taken at home and to attend appointments. Embedding a chatbot into Whatsapp solved issues for those that are not tech savvy and find it difficult to navigate web pages to find material that is relevant to their own situation. [Link]

• Bristol Myers Squibb is transforming its document processes for clinical trials: documentation that took scientists weeks now gets to a first draft in minutes.

• DaVita is using AI to transform kidney care, including analyzing medical records, uncovering critical patient insights, and reducing errors. AI enables physicians to focus on personalized care, resulting in significant improvements in healthcare delivery.

• HCA Healthcare is testing Cati, a virtual AI caregiver assistant that helps to ensure continuity of care when one caregiver shift ends and another begins. They are also using gen AI to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care.

Industrials

• Honeywell has an excellent interview with its Chief Digital Technology Officer Shelia where she lays out an excellent 5 point plan
  1. Using Microsoft as a single source of knowledge that its Copilot can access
  2. Github powers 3,500 software engineers to code faster
  3. Generate simple docs e.g. internal technical Q&A for customer support
  4. (Not talked about enough) Buying Generative AI embedded products
  5. Embedding AI into products and services

Slide

• Honeywell also has Maintenance Assist, which has text conversations with users, providing them with swift and accurate troubleshooting guidance. Very beneficial for new employees.

Financial Services

• PenFed adds another channel (chat) that handles 25% of internal support requests and 40,000 customer questions a month. [Link]

• BBVA uses AI to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats with more accuracy, speed, and scale. The platform now surfaces critical security data in seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours, and delivers highly automated responses.

Technology

• Workday uses Generative AI to enable:

  • Generating Job Descriptions in Minutes Versus Hours
  • Analyzing and Correcting Contracts for Faster, More Accurate Revenue Recognition
  • Creating Personalized Knowledge Management Articles With Ease
  • Personalising debt collection messaging to recover funds faster
  • Workday's App Builder, Developer Copilot will provide text-to-code generation capabilities
  • Creating Employee Growth Plans to Foster and Retain Talent

• Atlassian shipped automatic exec summaries, knowledge integration eg. documentation accessible in Slack, natural language to JQL/SQL, Q&A search for Confluence and more.

• Turing is customizing Gemini Code Assist on their private codebase, empowering their developers with highly personalized and contextually relevant coding suggestions that have increased productivity around 30 percent and made day-to-day coding more enjoyable.

• Wayfair piloted Code Assist, and those developers with the code agent were able to set up their environments 55 percent faster than before, there was a 48 percent increase in code performance during unit testing, and 60 percent of developers reported that they were able to focus on more satisfying work. Watch the session to learn more.

Telecoms and media

• Warner Bros partnered with Cinelytic's AI-driven project management system, which can predict better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates, value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters. [Link]

• Paramount uses AI to automate manual processes to create the essential metadata and video summaries used across its Paramount+ platform for showcasing content and creating personalized experiences for viewers.

Manufacturing

• Rolls Royce extends time between maintenance by 50% using real time data to see if they need to fix something. [Link]

Government

• District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority uses AI to review CCTV footage to assess sewer pipe status in real time. [Link]

• The Minnesota Division of Driver and Vehicle Services helps non-English speakers get licenses and other services with two-way real-time translation.

Horizontal

• Schneider Electric’s uses AI to empower employees to get mentors, volunteer for new opportunities, and gain new skills and experience within the organization. [Link]