Want Your Company to Be Successful? Mark Cuban Says A.I. Is Key

Don’t hesitate to explore this technology, says the ‘Shark Tank’ investor, even if the payoff isn’t immediate. Forgo A.I. and you risk becoming a dinosaur.

Mark Cuban knows a little bit about emerging technologies, and to him, all roads lead to artificial intelligence. There are two types of companies in the world, he said at a recent Harvard Business Review leadership conference, “those who are great with AI and everyone else.”

The Shark Tank star is known for being bullish on integrating new technologies, including crypto and NFTs, but he’s especially keen on artificial intelligence. If companies want to scale their organizations, then they should dive headfirst into AI, assuming that they haven’t done so already. “If you look at the biggest market cap companies, all but maybe Berkshire Hathaway are industry leaders in AI,” Cuban wrote in an email to Inc. “They over-index in AI investment and it has paid off for them.”

AI savvy is something that Cuban looks for when he’s investing, and something he deemed necessary to master if he wanted to stay ahead of the competition.

There’s a slew of applications for deploying AI within an organization: automation, customer engagement, and expanded data analysis are just a few. Deploying AI can also shave considerable time that employees now spend conducting manual tests, time that can be reinvested elsewhere. If you’re concerned about being too early an adopter, Cuban says it’s still better to take that risk, even if some believe gains made from integrating AI aren’t necessarily immediate.

But Cuban stresses that the payoff from AI is a function of experience, one that builds on itself over time as new technologies continue to be developed. So getting a head start allows a business to be ahead of the curve. That said, you can’t solely rely on AI for everything — even new technology misses the mark. “It’s going to be wrong almost as much as it’s right, but it’s going to uncover things that you might not otherwise be aware of, and you can continuously train it to make it smarter,” he says.

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