AI continues to promise to transform organisations, whole industries and the way in society interact. In this time, it’s important to embrace AI and explore ways in which it can provide value to you and your customers now and in the future.
AI driven business strategies can deliver benefit across the organisation from improving efficiency, decision making, customer experiences and to unlock growth opportunities. However, successful deployment of AI requires more than just being able to adopt new technology. It demands strategic thinking that aligns with the business strategy, operations and appetite of the business.
Given the noise and hype, confusion has crept into the Boardroom, business teams, IT departments and data teams. What the priorities are, where to go first, whether to sit out through the hype or be an early adopter. But with clarity of where AI can really make an impact and understanding how you build an organisation that can integrate AI into the value chain of the business, you are able to make progress.
Here are a four considerations for successfully embedding AI:
- AI to Improve Decision Making and Operations
- AI for Innovation and Rethinking Your Business Model
- AI Literacy and Culture
- AI Product Management
AI to improve decision making and operations
At its most fundamental level, AI can be used to speed up and improve decisions made. AI is incredible at analysing vast data sets, identify patterns and trends and serve those to a human to take action, or to automate action by another system. Its ability to process and analyse data at high speeds leads to more informed decisions, streamlined operations, increased productivity, and speed up innovation.
This is great for operational, day to day decisions such as choosing which marketing offers to send to people, predicting patient outcomes and tailoring treatment, fraudulent transactions in real-time and improving operational efficiencies. Likewise, this is also great for longer term strategic planning and forecasting as AI can model scenarios and present best cases.
AI for innovation and rethinking your business model
In of itself using AI can be classed as innovation, as despite it being around for many decades, more recent developments in Generative AI are new and burgeoning. Having an appetite to go early and test this innovative technology can give a head start while others are still considering the risks, being concerned with downsides and struggling to get to the starting line.
You can look at AI as a tool to improve the business. Or you can see it as a way to rethink your business model entirely. Amazon Go, for example, is a retail concept that makes use of AI in various forms (e.g. computer vision, sensor fusion, deep learning) to create a shopping experience for brick-and-mortar groceries stores that removes many of the traditional steps involved buying your weekly shop. Pick up your goods, walk out the shop, your Amazon account is charged for the goods you took. No scanning, queuing, checkout process.
AI literacy and culture
With any innovation comes a period of anxiety, uncertainty and risk. To remove those and to really take the benefits of AI work needs to be done to educate and build a culture of humans and AI working together.
AI has the potential to change every role within a business. How its done, which roles are needed and how technology sits alongside the valuable work of humans to deliver great outcomes. Some see the benefit of that, some just see the downside and risks.
AI literacy is about closing the gap between the hype and uncertainty with the reality and ability to execute. This is about educating leadership on how best to deploy AI, what it means to be AI-driven, the considerations and risks associated with it and the transformation required. Its about educating individuals in how to work with data, with AI to improve what they do and how they do it.
AI product management
AI is essentially technology. Technology should exist to improve and enhance us as individuals, teams, companies, and society. This all goes wrong when we approach it with the mindset that we have some technology, AI in this case, now we should find what we can do with it.
The better approach is to look at the strategic objectives of a business, or the current opportunities and challenges and identify the right solutions to solve those. Then bring the right technology to the table and consider how it can support in those endeavours.
Product Management is a critical skill needed to do this. Thinking of the solutions you build as products that are there to solve a problem, has features and benefits and is improved and iterated over time helps to ensure you are building the right things, in an agile, cost-effective way. Product Management is an approach and set of skills that allows you to follow the outcome and build the right things.
AI isn’t in the future. Its here now and embracing it, making decisions on direction and where it can impact will move you forward. By strategically embedding AI into your business and adapting the way you work, you can drive start to innovate on how you design and execute your business strategy.
