Four years ago, the $70 billion Alibaba Group, one of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence users, teamed up with Mars, the $35 billion global leader in confectioneries, to figure out the types of candy and chocolates that consumers in China prefer. The fresh consumer data that Alibaba continually gathers from the millions of people shopping on its various platforms turned up the counterintuitive finding that many Chinese who buy chocolates also purchase spicy snacks at the same time. Using that data-driven insight, Mars developed a sweet-and-spicy product: a candy bar that contains Szechuan peppercorns, the source of China’s spicy “mala” flavor.

Even though Mars didn’t conduct any other consumer research to reinforce the A.I.-driven insight, Spicy Snickers proved to be a winner on the mainland. Depending on A.I. also saved the company time; instead of the two to three years that it normally takes to launch a product, Mars was able to bring Spicy Snickers to market for the first time in August 2017, less than 12 months after the collaboration with Alibaba started. As a result, Spicy Snickers helped Mars China meet its goal of ensuring that new products should generate 10% of revenues every year.

Using A.I. to generate revenue—as Mars did in China—still appears to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s odd, given that the use of A.I. applications in everyday life, such as machine translation services, virtual assistants, and automated manufacturing, is proliferating around us. And the technology’s ability to replace human decision-making, which proved to be useful when the COVID-19 crisis engulfed the world last year, has led business to deploy A.I. to reduce costs and replace employees. But as the post-pandemic recovery takes shape, companies will have to tap into the myriad ways in which A.I. can boost revenues if they are to get ahead of rivals. Almost 50% of companies have tried, but only 10% are generating significant increases in revenue by using A.I., according to the recent 2020 MIT-BCG A.I. survey of over 2,500 executives.