Is your company transforming into a butterfly, or is it just training to be a faster caterpillar?

That metaphor—coined or at least popularized by George Westerman, principal research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy—captures the challenges of digitization. In other words, has your digital program actually been transformational or merely incremental?

To explore this question, we interviewed more than 20 executives at companies with major digital programs and distilled the core themes of those conversations. Overall, executives seem proud of their achievements but wish they had begun earlier and moved faster. They recognize, however, that going forward the stakes are rising significantly, in two specific ways:

• The adoption of what we call AI@scale introduces much larger changes in operating models and skills than did traditional digital and big data programs.
• As value pools shift in all industries, a fierce fight not only for competitive advantage but also for outright digital supremacy is under way, with the future of entire companies at stake.

To offer a glimpse of this future, we provide examples of leading companies in several industries that are moving aggressively to build a stronghold based on digital and AI. We then offer guidance on how companies can compete—how they can take off and fly rather than merely crawl faster.