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The common mistakes stopping businesses from maximising the benefits of AI
Professor Elena Gaura
University news / Business news / AI and Digital Technologies
Tuesday 06 October 2026
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An AI expert at Coventry University is urging businesses to avoid common mistakes when adopting AI so they can make the most of the technology.
Professor Elena Gaura, Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research and AI Lead for Coventry University Group, says many firms are missing opportunities to gain a competitive advantage by falling into common pitfalls.
Prof Gaura believes business leaders need to think carefully about where the technology can add value within their organisation before reaching for an AI tool, and warns against taking a piecemeal approach to adoption.
AI is here to stay, so businesses need to make sure they are ready to benefit.
Companies often measure AI adoption by the number of tools they have bought or the proportion of staff using them. Those figures show reach but they say little about whether AI is improving the business.
A better starting point is to identify a problem that matters to the company, understand the process around it and decide what improvement would be valuable. The technology will continue to develop – the advantage lies in being ready to use it well.
If AI completes one task in minutes but the result then waits days for approval, the bottleneck has simply moved downstream. If it generates more cases than a team can review, the process may become slower.
Professor Elena Gaura
Prof Gaura explained that effective AI depends on the quality of the data it relies on, so companies need to make sure that information is accurate and up to date. Human oversight is also vital.
She also said companies are not always putting mechanisms in place to measure the impact of AI on their processes or capturing what works so they can build on it across their organisations.
These tools can save time, remove bottlenecks, support better strategic decisions, improve staff wellbeing and much more. This technology is now being widely adopted in society, in the same way that the internet evolved from a useful technology into an indispensable one.
Change that saves money but makes decisions less reliable is unlikely to be a success. Equally, an improvement in access, quality or staff capacity may matter even when it does not produce an immediate cash saving.
Without mechanisms in place to record the effects as they occur, retrospective claims of ‘time saved’ are difficult to test.
Professor Elena Gaura
To find out more about how Coventry University is using AI.
