Between hope and hype: What’s the (real) business case for AI?

Leading consultancies have portrayed AI as a revolutionary general-purpose technology that can add to global economic output and increase global GDP by several percentage points. Recent company surveys found business leaders eager to embrace AI and thereby future-proof their companies. Real-world experiences have been mixed, however. Core AI companies have seen their valuations soar to unseen heights; many others struggle to exploit AI’s transformative potential to improve their bottom line. Is the AI economy a ‘winner-takes-all’ game that only benefits a small number of firms and countries after all? And what role should governments play to support a digital economy that benefits citizens and companies, rather than only a handful of tech giants from abroad?

In this panel discussion, we tackle these questions and more, providing an opportunity for four business and strategy consulting experts to examine how AI shapes companies and productivity, and where public policy enters the picture – both as undesirable obstacle and as essential support for healthy digitization.  

About the speakers

Jur Gaarlandt is Partner at Artefact Benelux – a a global data-driven services company specialising in consulting for data, AI, data transformation and data & digital marketing. Before Artefact Jur was a.o. Partner at SparkOptimus and CMO at VakantieVeilingen. Next to this, Jur lectures at INSEAD on how to organize for AI and digital disruption.

Tushita Garga is Regional Marketing Leader, EMEA and Asia at Microsoft. She is an accomplished marketing professional with a passion for driving business growth through strategic marketing initiatives. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, she has successfully developed and executed comprehensive marketing strategies that have resulted in increased brand awareness, customer engagement, and revenue generation.

Matti van Engelen is Associate Partner and AI lead at SparkOptimus, where he helps businesses leverage the power of data & (Gen) AI. With a background both as a data scientist & strategy consultant, he combines technology and business angles to create business value at scale. In the past 2 years his focus has largely been on Generative AI, where he has helped national and international players leverage and scale up this new technology.

Daniel Mügge (moderator) is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). As leader of the NWO Vici project RegulAite, he investigates EU governance of AI and its embeddedness of global geopolitical and economic competition. At the UvA, he is also co-founder of the research platform and the research priority area AI & Politics. A political economist by training, he has been a visiting researcher at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, the London School of Economics and the Freie Universität Berlin, his alma mater.