How AI is reshaping how businesses operate and create value

As organizations look to generate greater value from their artificial intelligence investments, the focus seems to be shifting from how to use AI to how businesses should operate because of it. That may mean rethinking how decisions are made, investments are evaluated, and people and technology work together to create business value.

Many organizations have moved quickly to adopt AI, but translating that momentum into measurable business value has proved more difficult. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in day-to-day work, leaders are gauging where technology adds the greatest value—and where human judgment, creativity, and decision-making remain essential. That shift is also creating shared accountability between business and technology leaders, with AI investments increasingly evaluated against measurable business outcomes rather than solely on technology deployment.

One company navigating that shift is Advanced Technology Services Inc. (ATS), which helps manufacturers improve equipment reliability and operational performance while reducing production downtime. As part of Deloitte’s 2026 Global Technology Leadership Study,¹ we spoke with Sandra Marchand, chief marketing officer at ATS, about how the marketing organization has evolved its approach to AI over the past year.

Q: How has AI changed the way ATS operates over the past year?

A: The biggest shift is that we’ve stopped thinking about AI as a collection of tools and started thinking about it as an operating model. Our focus is no longer on experimenting with technology but on creating a scalable system in which people, AI agents, data, and workflows work together toward a common business outcome. Every investment is evaluated against growth, profitability, and customer impact.

Q: As ATS has integrated AI into customer acquisition and engagement, how has the company built the governance and clarity needed to support growth?

A: Within marketing, AI became another operating capability rather than a standalone technology initiative. The conversation has shifted from “How do we use AI?” to “How do we operate differently because AI exists?” We’ve learned that scaling AI is less about technology and more about operating discipline. Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack AI tools. They struggle because they haven’t redesigned their governance, decision rights, workforce models, and accountability systems to capture value from those tools.

Q: Have your software costs gone up as you’ve adopted AI?

A: Costs have increased, but we don’t view AI as a productivity experiment. We view it as a capital allocation decision. Every AI investment must compete for resources in the same way any other growth initiative would. The question isn’t whether technology costs are rising, but whether the value created exceeds the investment. We’ve found that disciplined deployment of AI can simultaneously improve productivity, customer engagement, and revenue generation.

Q: As AI has become more central to the business, what changes have you made to governance and decision-making to ensure those investments create value?

A: Two things come to mind: structure and revenue. One lesson we’ve learned is that scaling AI requires governance. Every new capability must have a clear business owner, a measurable outcome, and an integration path into the broader operating model. Without that discipline, organizations can create complexity faster than value.

That discipline extends to how we evaluate investments. At ATS, we measure success through return on investment, holding ourselves to at least a 4:1 return, meaning every digital investment dollar generates $4 in profitable revenue. It’s our core accountability metric, helping us invest deliberately, align stakeholders, and focus not just on pipeline and revenue but on margin-driven growth.

We are still early in the journey. The objective isn’t to deploy AI everywhere. It’s to deploy it deliberately in places where it creates measurable business value.

Q: What does scaled AI look like across ATS’s customer acquisition efforts?

A: AI allows us to identify buying signals earlier, shorten decision cycles, and allocate resources toward the opportunities with the highest probability of value creation. The result isn’t simply better marketing efficiency. It’s improved enterprise capital efficiency, less wasted spend, and stronger alignment between commercial activity and profitable growth.