AI in Core Business: Where Real Competitive Advantage Is Built

There’s a misconception in many organizations that artificial intelligence is mainly about automating routine tasks in support functions, payroll in HR, invoice processing in finance or chatbots in IT and if you believe that AI’s primary value lies only in efficiency gains in back-office processes, you’re missing the bigger picture.

According to Boston Consulting Group research, a striking majority of companies are still struggling to scale AI value beyond pilot stage, with 74% reporting challenges in realizing and scaling impact from their AI initiatives not because of the technology itself, but because it’s often deployed too narrowly or without clear business alignment.

Even more importantly, the lion’s share of AI’s potential value is concentrated in core, revenue-driving business functions not in support roles. BCG’s latest analysis shows that about 70% of AI value lies in core business activities such as sales, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing, pricing strategy and other operational centres of competitive advantage while functions like IT account for a far smaller share. This confirms what the most successful companies already know: AI isn’t just a tool for cost reduction, it’s a strategic engine for growth, differentiation and market leadership.

Ref: AI Adoption in 2024: 74% of Companies Struggle to Achieve and Scale Value

Core Areas Where AI Drives Competitive Advantage

Here are real-world domains where AI is reshaping core business battlegrounds far beyond mundane automation:

Banking & Financial Services

AI is transforming credit decisions and risk management. Advanced models can analyse complex borrower profiles faster and more accurately than traditional underwriting systems, reducing default rates and accelerating loan approvals. AI also enhances investment decisions, spotting market signals that humans can miss, enabling smarter, data-driven portfolio strategies.

Ref: AI-driven revolution in credit underwriting: Technical implementation and impact analysis

Healthcare & Life Sciences

Far from admin assistants in back offices, AI systems are now assisting clinicians in diagnosis and treatment planning. Sophisticated models help interpret imaging data, recommend personalized treatment pathways, and even flag early signs of disease that human review might overlook directly impacting patient outcomes and service quality.

Ref: 7 Powerful Examples of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Transforming Patient Outcomes

Insurance & Risk Assessment

AI isn’t just automating spreadsheets it’s reshaping core insurance operations like claims assessment, fraud detection, risk analysis, and personalized pricing. For example, Salesforce’s AI solutions are already being used to streamline and automate claims processing, helping insurers analyse documents, flag suspicious patterns for fraud, and settle straightforward claims faster all of which improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Ref: Using AI insurance claims to deliver fast and accurate decisions

Embed AI at the Heart of Your Business

Contrary to popular belief, the greatest value from AI isn’t in small cost savings it’s in augmenting or reinventing how business is done. Organizations that embed AI directly into their core products and operations are pulling ahead of competitors.

Examples include:

• Banks offering AI-powered financial advice that’s personalized at scale.
• Healthcare providers using AI-guided care pathways to improve outcomes and patient satisfaction
• Insurers using real-time AI risk scoring to customize premiums and reduce claims leakage.These aren’t back-office roles, they directly drive revenue, loyalty, and long-term competitive advantage.

How NewOrbit Embeds AI Where Real Work Happens

At NewOrbit, we’ve built an AI-powered tool designed to sit directly inside the moments where real work happens, meetings. The platform captures and structures conversations across different meeting types, from daily stand-ups to in-depth requirements workshops, automatically extracting intent, decisions, risks, and opportunities as they happen.

By transforming unstructured discussion into clear, actionable insight almost instantly, the tool enables teams to move from conversation to clarity in minutes rather than weeks. This allows us to produce rapid estimates and highlight where real business value lies, helping clients make informed decisions earlier and making sure that no minor detail is missed.

The Truth

Many organizations still default to applying AI in support functions because these areas feel safer, more contained, and much simpler to implement as well as generally risk free, so failures carry less perceived risk. This mindset often leads to AI being applied where it is most convenient, not where it is most valuable. When AI initiatives aren’t anchored to core business outcomes the most important points like revenue growth, customer experience they struggle to scale beyond pilots as they become fixated on narrow, low-impact use cases.

True AI impact emerges only when organizations gain confidence to integrate AI with embedding intelligence into the workflows, products, and decisions that drive the business forward.

In our experience, sustainable AI value emerges only when organisations focus on what we call AI applicability: the overlap between a real business need and an AI capability that can meaningfully enhance it. Without that overlap, AI projects often optimise the wrong things – efficiently, but with little strategic impact.

If you’re a business leader sitting on AI pilots or isolated automation wins, this is a good moment to pause and rethink where AI should sit in your organisation.

The most successful teams start by understanding their core workflows and decisions — and only then explore how AI can meaningfully augment them.

That shift, from experimenting with AI to applying it deliberately, is where sustainable competitive advantage is built.