Eye on Innovation: Advancing AI Maturity

Link: https://blog.planview.com/eye-on-innovation-advancing-ai-maturity/

Editor’s Note: The “Eye on Innovation” series connects you with what we’re doing at Planview and the market at large, reflecting our conversations with technology and business leaders around the world and their impact on the advancements we make as a company.

Today’s report on the next-generation evolution of AI is one you don’t want to miss. Read on as Planview’s Chief Data Scientist, Dr. Rich Sonnenblick, explores why most AI pilots never scale, and how connected intelligence moves organizations from experiments to enterprise impact.

These days, talking with business and technology leaders about AI often centers on a critical topic: AI maturity.

Most organizations have experimented with AI and are educating their workforce. Many others have built pilots and capabilities, using gen AI – including LLMs – to increase individual productivity and efficiency. In fact, McKinsey’s latest Global Survey on AI reports that 88% of companies use gen AI in at least one business function (up from 78% a year earlier).

As adoption rates climb, so does the desire of leaders everywhere for a resounding ROI on AI. The deciding factor? According to MIT, it’s AI maturity.

MIT’s AI maturity framework outlines a four-stage journey:

In stage 1, organizations experiment and prepare for AI;
In stage 2, they build AI pilots and capabilities;
In stage 3, they develop AI ways of working;
In stage 4, they become AI-future ready.

Their research reports that “organizations see the greatest financial impact in moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3 of AI maturity,” underscoring the benefits of embedding AI use across the business.

And yet, according to McKinsey, vertical or function-specific use cases – where the greatest potential for financial return lies – seldom make it out of the pilot phase because of technical, organizational, data, and cultural barriers.

We hear a similar sentiment about the factors that affect AI maturity.

What’s Really Delaying AI Maturity?

Some companies tell us they’re strapped with legacy system integration constraints or siloed departments. Others disclose that poor data quality – or the age-old issue of resistance to change – is preventing them from scaling AI at their desired pace.

To us, these barriers spring from a common source: The inherent complexity of digital connected work.

Digital connected work is the interdependent web that weaves together every critical element of an enterprise, from idea to outcome. People, technology, data, dependencies, and other critical elements of a business are all linked together. In this environment, one of the biggest risks is disconnection – silos that decrease alignment and increase delays, along with other negative impacts.

We see silos impeding AI maturity in several ways. One example is when an AI tool can’t access capacity constraints from resource management systems or dependency data from delivery teams. As a result, the AI can’t identify which strategic initiatives will be at risk, and delivery teams can’t see how their work connects to top-level Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Without connected context, each department stays stuck running isolated experiments that rarely scale to drive enterprise-wide value.

Advancing AI maturity requires bridging these silos with intelligence that understands the full context of your business, not just individual functions. This is where AI for digital connected work comes in – and here’s where we can help.

The Anvi Advantage for Digital Connected Work

Planview Anvi is the next-generation enterprise AI for digital connected work, combining the full spectrum of AI capabilities across our end-to-end platform – from our Connected Work Graph to generative and agentic AI.

Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Anvi understands the relationships between portfolio investments, resource capacity, strategic objectives, and cross-team dependencies. Anvi operates on Planview’s comprehensive data fabric, leveraging deep domain expertise to provide guidance and intelligent actions that help you prioritize strategic investments and deliver positive outcomes.

Cognizant enhanced their delivery productivity, accelerated user adoption, and improved project risk identification and mitigation with Anvi.

After establishing their PPM foundation with Planview, Cognizant moved from piloting gen AI to embedding AI capabilities directly into workflows across governance, training, and technical reporting domains.

As Estela Lauricella-Thota, Senior Director of Technology Transformation, explains: “We’ve built a solid foundation of data and processes. This positions us very well to leverage gen AI and Planview Anvi to drive the next wave of transformation – enhancing productivity, accelerating adoption, and achieving higher levels of PPM maturity.”

Here’s the breakdown of Anvi’s capabilities.

Data Fabric

This is the foundation that enables AI to scale beyond isolated pilots. Our multi-year investment in developing a connected work semantic layer means Anvi goes beyond aggregating data, because it understands what that data means in your business context.

It knows how a strategic objective connects to funded initiatives, which connect to team capacity, and which connect to individual work items and dependencies across tools.

Anvi operates across your entire work ecosystem, identifying risks and opportunities that span multiple systems. These are patterns impossible to see when data lives in silos.

Connected Work Graph

This is where Anvi moves from productivity tool to strategic execution partner. Connected Work Graph creates a living map of how work connects across teams, projects, and outcomes.

What used to require analyzing rows of spreadsheets now happens visually.

Users can trace impact chains from execution activities to business objectives, identify hidden cross-portfolio dependencies before they derail outcomes, and eliminate structural bottlenecks that delay strategic initiatives.

Anvi continuously learns from your organizational work patterns, surfacing optimization recommendations that reduce coordination overhead. This enterprise-scale intelligence connects every dependency across your organization in real time, enabling AI to scale beyond narrow use cases into coordinated, cross-functional capabilities.

Conversational AI

Ask Anvi questions in natural language – such as “Which initiatives are at risk of missing Q3 deadlines?” or “Where have we overextended engineering resources?” – and get data-backed answers that pull from across your connected systems.

Beyond answering questions, Anvi provides contextual recommendations based on your role and embedded domain expertise, guiding you on portfolio prioritization, resource allocation, and strategic decisions.

You can also take intelligent actions directly through conversation: update projects, generate executive summaries, and create status reports. Instead of switching between tools to gather data, analyze it, and then act on it, you have a conversation that does all three.

Custom Agents

Build intelligent workflows that go farther than individual productivity. Start with prebuilt agents for common scenarios, such as portfolio health checks or resource planning, then customize them with your organization’s specific processes and guidelines. Schedule these agents to run automatically, delivering regular executive briefings or scanning for data quality lapses in upcoming work while you focus on more strategic tasks.

In the early days of Anvi – when the idea of agentic AI was still new – Planview staff used Anvi to create 200+ custom agents during a 60-minute workshop.

In-App

Risk detection proactively flags potential roadblocks and timeline risks based on patterns in your work data. Sentiment analysis automatically tracks team morale and stakeholder engagement across communications. Performance anomaly detection identifies unusual patterns in delivery metrics that need attention.

Plus, when you open Planview.Me, personalized insights surface the most relevant priorities for your specific role and workflow. The intelligence comes to you, embedded in the flow of work you’re already doing.

Moving Forward in the Age of AI

Today, it’s not enough to have high-quality data feeding your AI initiatives; that data must also be seen by your AI as the complex, connected web of resources, work, and objectives that it is. Advancing AI maturity requires deploying AI that understands your entire enterprise as a connected system.

That’s what Anvi delivers. It’s an innovation we’re proud to offer as we continue partnering with our customers to achieve the outcomes that matter most.

See Anvi in action with the Anvi on-demand demo or visit planview.com/ai.