BCG Executive: Companies Must Reimagine Business Processes to Unlock AI’s True Potential

Boston Consulting Group’s Global Chief AI Ethics Officer Steven Mills says the most critical step companies must take when adopting AI is not just training employees, but fundamentally reimagining how their businesses operate. According to Mills, organizations need to move beyond treating AI as a simple productivity tool and instead use it as a catalyst for transformation. He emphasized that simply assigning employees to use AI without proper support leads to poor adoption and minimal results. “What we found is that employees want about five hours of hands-on training, coaching, and mentoring,” Mills told Business Insider on the sidelines of Semafor’s World Economic Summit. “Only about a third are actually getting that.” Mills highlighted that real engagement with AI begins when workers experience its value firsthand. “Once they get the taste of value—say, using it to edit bullet points in an email and realizing it works well—they instantly start thinking about other ways to apply it,” he said. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: the more value employees see, the more they use AI, and the more value they generate. Despite the potential, a recent BCG report found that only 5% of companies are currently deriving meaningful value from AI. Mills attributes this to a lack of strategic vision. “Organizations aren’t stepping back to ask, ‘How do we reimagine our business processes, our service offerings now that we have AI?’” he said. “This is a transformational tool. It can do things we’ve never been able to do before, so we shouldn’t just plug it into old, human-centric workflows.” Mills, who also leads BCG’s Center for Digital Government, noted that the private sector’s rapid AI adoption is now pushing public institutions to catch up. “Governments have been behind, but they’re playing catch-up really fast—faster than I’ve seen before,” he said. He pointed to the growing trend of major AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Microsoft offering their AI tools at little or no cost to federal agencies. This affordable access, he believes, will soon lead to a sharp increase in adoption. “I think you’ll see a big hockey stick in the rate of adoption soon,” Mills said. “People already use this tech in their personal lives. They want the same access at work.”