Lessons from day 2 of Brainstorm AI: How strategic A.I. choices pay off

If day one of Brainstorm AI was about starting small and proving concepts, day two was about going big and achieving scale. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet started the morning session by saying that those companies making a “strategic choice” to lead in machine learning and A.I. are seeing superior results—with 5X the revenue growth of those that aren’t. (She elaborated in this piece for Fortune.)  

Some excerpts/outtakes:

 “Cloud is the enabler, data is the driver, and A.I. is the differentiator.”
—Julie Sweet, CEO, Accenture

“Machine learning isn’t a product. What you have is business problems that need solutions.”
—Sunil Dhaliwal, general partner, Amplify Partners

“I would have spent less time on the technology. Less time worry about whether I had the perfect technology and perfect algorithm. And I would spend more time getting consensus from my business partners.”
—Jeff McMillan, chief analytics and data officer, Morgan Stanley

“The discussion has shifted from ‘is it real?’ to ‘how do we scale?’”
—Karl Iagnemma, CEO, driverless vehicle company Motional

“We are applying deep learning to pet waste. It’s super important. If you imagine millions of robots that need to be able to detect it, understand what’s in front of them, and avoid it… We put a lot of energy into that.”
—Chris Jones, CTO, iRobot, maker of the Roomba

“One of the big advantages that China has is massive amounts of data. But if we can use, for instance, privacy enhancing technologies, we will be better able to compete in areas where our competitors don’t have any guard rails.”
—Lynne Parker, director, National Artificial Intelligence Initiative

Separately, for our Leadership Next podcast this week, Ellen McGirt and I interviewed Adrian Gore, founder and CEO of South Africa-based Discovery Group, which has pioneered health insurance policies that provide incentives for healthy behavior. He told a fascinating version of his company’s origin story:

“We started out in 1992, right at the time Nelson Mandela was coming out of prison. We had too few doctors, and massive levels of disease. And the government, I think rightly, had an obsession with no discrimination of any kind, no pre-existing conditions. It became clear to us the only real way to have a sustainable insurance model was to make people healthier.”

Imagine that. If only all insurance companies had discovered the same long ago. You can listen to the entire podcast on Apple or Spotify. By the way, Discovery was on Fortune’s very first Change the World list in 2015.

More news below.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

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This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.