Episode Details

AI is getting cheaper, faster and easier to put to work. So why are so many companies still struggling to show a return?

Purdue University’s Richard Ryffel and Mohammad Saifur Rahman join the AI Proving Ground Podcast to argue that the problem may be how businesses are thinking about AI in the first place. Treating it as another efficiency tool can only take you so far. The bigger opportunity comes when companies use cheaper intelligence to rethink how work gets done, where humans create value and what the business is capable of doing next.

The shift won’t happen overnight. There’s a J-curve between investing in AI and realizing its value, and getting through it may require a different approach to leadership, talent and even how we measure progress.

Because the real question isn’t how much work AI can replace. It’s what becomes possible when intelligence itself costs less.

Support for this episode provided by: Glean

Richard Ryffel is Special Advisor to the Dean and Professor of Practice at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business, where he works with business leaders on AI and executive education. He brings 35 years of experience across finance, investment management and corporate advisory, including roles at J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Edward Jones.

Mohammad Saifur Rahman is the Daniels School Chair in Management and Professor of Management at Purdue University’s Mitch Daniels School of Business. His research explores the economics of digitization, AI and decision-making, with a focus on how emerging technologies reshape business and create value. His work has appeared in Management Science, Information Systems Research and MIT Sloan Management Review.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.