These companies are rolling up their sleeves to implement AI

The economic gains it promises to unlock are almost unfathomable, so there’s no more urgent task than for leaders to roll up their sleeves and get started.

But many are finding it daunting to navigate the onslaught of new and constantly changing tools and large language models (LLMs). Early experiments for many companies have proved to be costly investments with lackluster gains.

A recent IBM survey of 2,000 global CEOs found that while leaders are still confident that AI is pivotal to their future, only 25% of their current AI initiatives delivered the returns on investment they had hoped for.

Still, across all sectors, there are companies that are beginning to figure it out. Fortune‘s newsroom set out to gather examples of AI implementations that are showing promising upside, in a new special digital issue that’s part of the series we’re calling Fortune AIQ, made possible by our partner, ServiceNow.

On Wall Street, for example, JPMorgan Chase says its internal AI use cases have unlocked an estimated $2 billion in value. The 240-year-old bank BNY has embraced AI as well, launching an internal tool called Eliza to help its employees build their own AI agents, and it is partnering with OpenAI to collaborate on financial services use cases.

Other Fortune 500 companies are creating AI avatars to aid corporate learning initiatives and even to mimic executive communications so they can produce them more frequently. Mondelez International said it has made 30,000 such videos this year, with the help of an AI avatar startup that’s backed by Mark Cuban.

In the $104 billion waste-management industry, AI can even help us recycle more efficiently. AMP, which makes an AI-driven system that sorts trash from recycling (something humans are notoriously terrible at), is helping companies reduce the costs of that grunt work by up to 50%—making recycling potentially profitable at last.

The key takeaway: Figuring out AI might be daunting, but it’s a business imperative.

As IBM vice chairman Gary Cohn said of his AI ROI survey, “the ultimate pay-off will only come to CEOs with the courage to embrace risk as opportunity.”