Beyond the hype: How AI is delivering real business results

Not so long ago, AI felt like a giant sandbox. Teams were testing tools, running pilot projects and seeing what might stick. But now the focus has firmly shifted to performance at scale, with AI woven into the fabric of how organizations run.

Instead of dabbling, organizations are building AI into core systems to help them grow revenue, work smarter, cut down on risk and create more streamlined customer experiences.

The shift is also cultural. The question used to be, “What can we try?” Now it’s “What business result are we driving?” AI initiatives are being linked directly to measurable business outcomes, clear ownership and real ROI.

At NTT DATA, we consistently see AI delivering impact across six drivers of business performance:

1. Reinventing core operations with AI-driven autonomy
2. Delivering hyperpersonalized, intelligent customer experiences
3. Unlocking new revenue streams and AI-native business models
4. Strengthening risk, compliance and resilience
5. Enabling sovereign, secure and controlled AI architecture
6. Augmenting the workforce with AI

Already, organizations classified as AI leaders in NTT DATA’s 2026 Global AI Report: A Playbook for AI Leaders — based on their AI strategy, AI maturity and AI-driven profits — are far more likely than non-leaders to realize tangible business benefits from AI.

They’re also leading the pack in using AI to support front-office, mid-office and back-office integrations, and they report very significant investment in AI, both currently and in the next two years.

So, what does this look like on the ground? Let’s explore how these technologies are delivering measurable impact for NTT DATA clients across industries.

• ALSO READ → AI leadership: The ultimate competitive advantage in 2026 and beyond

1. Reinventing core operations with AI-driven autonomy

AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done. It’s taking repetitive tasks off employees’ plates, supporting teams with smarter insights and smoothing out the messy, complicated workflows that hamper productivity.

Where AI is delivering impact

• It took a team of roughly 70 people at the US-based multinational infrastructure group Balfour Beatty Communities to review about 500,000 maintenance work orders a year. NTT DATA helped the company deploy a Gen-AI-powered solution that can review 100% of these work orders with over 98% accuracy in a fraction of the time, relieving the human team of hours of tedious work so they can focus on servicing residents.
• Working with Continental Automotive in Germany, we leveraged retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows to develop an AI companion that supports engineering requirements in automotive product development. The innovation significantly streamlined engineering workflows and has delivered notable efficiency improvements in the development process.  
• Internal and external paint defect detection previously relied on time-consuming, resource-heavy and error-prone manual inspections by skilled professionals. When Asian Paints, the Indian multinational, sought to optimize this process, we developed a no-code AI solution on Google Cloud Platform to precisely detect paint defects based on parameters including position, color and texture, as well as types of defects such as algae, blisters and peeling.

2. Delivering hyperpersonalized, intelligent customer experiences

Organizations are using AI to deliver customer experiences that feel personal, timely and relevant — the kind that drive more conversions and leave customers engaged and genuinely satisfied.

Where AI is delivering impact

• For leading international cosmetics brand L’Oréal, NTT DATA created an AI-driven sales assistant that converses with customers using the brand’s WhatsApp and Instagram platforms and provides hyperpersonalized recommendations. The time it takes for shoppers to add five products to their shopping carts is down from an average of six minutes to just 37 seconds.
• At SURA, one of the top five insurance providers in Latin America, many policyholders didn’t fully understand the benefits of their insurance, which led to cancellations. The company also wanted to streamline reimbursements. With our support, they implemented a GenAI-powered chatbot answering questions about services, insurance coverage and policy details via WhatsApp, as well as a system combining optical character recognition to help support staff verify the identities of customers with health insurance, analyze invoices and decide on reimbursement.
• At The Open, the world’s oldest golf tournament, we’re using AI to deliver real-time competition updates and insights. The stream of live data increases fan engagement and contributes to creating the perfect fan experience.
• In Italy, we worked with the Rome city authorities and Microsoft to implement a virtual, AI-enabled tour guide named Julia, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Instead of seeing only the most popular answers to their tourism-related questions, visitors who converse with Julia get specific answers based on their questions.

3. Unlocking new revenue streams and AI-native business models

AI isn’t just about doing things faster. It’s also becoming a real driver of revenue, helping organizations spot new opportunities and speed up product development. AI opens the door to entirely new ways of doing business.

Where AI is delivering impact

• With NTT DATA’s help, Record TV, the second-largest Brazilian television broadcaster, transformed scattered audience data into actionable insights. By unifying user data and deploying AI-powered marketing tools, they increased engagement, improved customer retention and accelerated their digital revenue growth, turning data into a strategic asset for long-term business success.
• For a leading global beverage manufacturer, we deployed GenAI tools, including GenAI agent technology, to analyze vast datasets and identify optimal trade spending allocations, while also streamlining decision-making for retail and marketing teams. Making these insights readily available has delivered about $10 million in new annual revenue opportunities and $30 million in revenue lift.
• Gobi Cashmere, a premium cashmere producer based in Mongolia, worked with siloed systems with multiple data sources, restricting their ability to get consolidated insights and make better business decisions. We built a unified platform for streamlined sales and customer engagement to boost sales by integrating with company-wide key performance indicators. The platform features real-time data gathering that consolidates data from diverse sources, dashboards and advanced analytics for faster decision-making.
• Nestlé, the Swiss multinational food and drink conglomerate, is using proprietary GenAI tools to accelerate product innovation. Teams can generate, test and refine product ideas faster, shortening development cycles and helping new consumer products reach the market more quickly. Nestlé is now deploying AI in nearly every aspect of their business, including sales, marketing and legal.

4. Strengthening risk, compliance and resilience

Because AI can sift through massive amounts of data in real time, it helps organizations spot risks earlier, improve safety and make smarter decisions before small issues turn into big problems.

• ALSO READ → AI governance demystified: Your blueprint for trust, compliance and innovation

Where AI is delivering impact

• The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in the UK, a specialized cancer center, has worked with NTT DATA and CARPL.ai, an imaging AI and machine learning operations platform, to build an advanced AI-powered radiology analysis service for the development and evaluation of AI in medical imaging. AI algorithms will improve the accuracy of cancer evaluations, leading to faster response times, more accurate diagnoses and better-targeted treatments.
• We’re working with Toyota Motor Corporation in the field of mobility and AI-enabled telecommunications to help prevent traffic accidents. Toyota is making safety a priority for their vehicles, with a need for high-speed, high-quality communication, powerful computing resources and robust AI models. To achieve this, we’re jointly developing a Mobility AI Platform.
• With our help, Ono Pharmaceutical Co. in Japan now uses natural language processing for analyzing the unstructured electronic health records of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. This allows healthcare practitioners to identify the characteristics of patients who are resistant to medication and, ultimately, improve care.

5. Enabling sovereign, secure and controlled AI architecture

As AI becomes business-critical, organizations are getting serious about how it’s built and governed. They’re investing in autonomy, sovereignty and secure enterprise-ready capabilities that protect data, meet regulatory and private AI requirements and earn trust — not just from regulators but from customers and employees too.

Where AI is delivering impact

• Dennemeyer, the intellectual property (IP) manager, chose Mistral AI and NTT DATA to develop an AI-driven application for advanced patent searches and analyses. The secure, adaptable system improves usability, search and integration while maintaining complete data protection.
• NTT DATA and MISTRAL AI are working together to support the Luxembourg government at a time when AI sovereignty is an increasingly important topic, using secure and reliable infrastructure to help them find the most efficient way of determining their own trajectory and rate of AI progress.

6. Augmenting the workforce with AI

AI transforms how people work. Across industries, organizations are using AI to augment human capability. They are giving employees faster access to knowledge, reducing cognitive load and enabling better, more confident decision-making.

Rather than replacing jobs, AI is acting as a real-time copilot that automates repetitive tasks and allows employees to focus on more strategic work.

Where AI is delivering impact

• In Spain, NTT DATA and Microsoft integrated Copilot for Microsoft 365 into the operations of MasOrange to help their employees work smarter and faster. The impact? An ROI of more than 400%, with employees spending significantly less time on daily tasks.
• The BMW Group introduced a GenAI platform across its global vehicle manufacturing operations with NTT DATA as the implementation partner. Developed in partnership with expert teams from BMW IT Hubs, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, the secure, cloud-native platform supports AI-driven innovation throughout the value chain — from IT and procurement to development. It enables the broad use of GenAI within business units and empowers employees without technical backgrounds to create their own AI applications.

• We used GraphRAG, a structured, hierarchical approach to RAG, at the UK media and telecommunications company Virgin Media O2 to solve complex, enterprise-wide requirements for information discovery and document analysis. The company now uses multimodal and agentic AI to integrate a range of data sources and automatically generate new designs.

Join us at the leading edge of AI

Across industries and geographies, one thing is clear: AI has moved out of the test lab and into the core of the business. It’s being measured, managed and relied on.

Organizations are using it to increase productivity, create better customer experiences, unlock new revenue opportunities, manage risk and build trusted AI foundations for the future.

At NTT DATA, we work alongside you to make that shift real. With extensive industry experience, strong technology partnerships and a practical approach to responsible AI, we help you deploy AI securely, scale it with confidence and turn ambition into results.