From the next major LLM release such as ChatGPT 5 to autonomous agents, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). However, the expected benefits often cannot be fully materialized in practice. In many companies, data and AI initiatives do not make it past the pilot phase, while others fail completely (Estrada 2025; Haefner et al. 2023) .An important reason is that the current enthusiasm often focuses too much on technologies and ignores fundamental business problems.
Ultimately, the goal of any data and AI initiative should be to create strategic business value that pro-vides companies a competitive advantage (Grover et al. 2018). This requires a shift in perspective to-wards the fundamental data assets and the exploitation of their inherent potential, regardless of the analysis technologies used, such as business analytics, traditional or generative AI, following the max-im: AI as a means and data value creation as an end.
In this blog post, Nick Kakuschke introduces the research area “Value Creation from Data and AI” at the Competence Center Future Financial Services, where we develop applicable tools that support compa-nies to realize strategic value from data and AI.