For many family businesses, artificial intelligence currently sits in an uncomfortable place. It is everywhere– in headlines, board discussions and vendor pitches – yet often nowhere in terms of sustained value. KPMG’s recent report Beyond the buzz explores this reality through a brand and retail lens, but it has resonance for family businesses across sectors too. Despite growing investment and high confidence in AI’s potential, many organisations remain stuck in fragmented experiments that add complexity without delivering meaningful productivity or growth.
Perhaps this is a familiar pattern for your own family enterprise. What we frequently see is that AI pilots are launched within isolated functions – marketing tests a chatbot, finance deploys anomaly detection, operations experiments with forecasting tools – and while each initiative may work in isolation, together they rarely amount to transformation. The result is cost, distraction and a creeping sense that AI is something happening to the business rather than within it.
