Harnessing the full potential of AI: 5 essential elements of adoption for business success
Anyone interested in business and technology knows that AI is already driving seismic waves of change in industry and in everyday life. This is no longer a futuristic concept but a current reality with profound multi-billion dollar implications. In fact, according to PwC, AI is intended to this represents 15,000 billion dollars to the global economy by 2030.
However, while its reach and influence is undoubtedly increasing, many businesses and organizations still struggle to implement it effectively. In my own experience working with global enterprises to deploy AI and data-driven initiatives, I’ve found that it often comes down to a lack of preparation. In many cases, haste (or fear of missing out) often means that the groundwork needed to ensure foundation stability is ignored, rushed or neglected.
I will therefore try here to highlight what seem to me to be the key ingredients of this essential preparatory phase. This includes five areas where preparation will significantly improve the overall value, impact and likelihood of success of any organization that wants to adopt AI.
1. Align AI strategy with business goals
Let’s start with perhaps the most important message: AI strategy should always be aligned with strong business objectives. There is currently a huge amount of hype around AI and a lot of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). But the decision to deploy AI should not be driven by this, but rather by its ability to solve your own specific problems.
This means that decision-makers must be able to identify priorities and have a comprehensive understanding of how AI (or whatever technology they are considering) can address them.
AI has the potential to improve just about any aspect of a business’s performance or improve any metric. Your own specific challenges may involve generating profit or growth, improving customer satisfaction, innovating product and service development, reducing waste, or improving sustainability.
Amazon is an example of a well-known company that is using AI strategically well. It improves customer experience through product recommendations and efficient logistics. Another example is Netflix, which creates personalized content recommendations designed to keep us subscribed.
In the age of AI, businesses will sink or swim depending on their ability to identify important problems and find solutions to them. Ensuring these skills are in place among management teams and decision-makers is a crucial part of preparation.
2. Cultivate an AI-friendly culture
It is natural and inevitable that some people will be fearful or outright hostile towards AI. Any company hoping to benefit must understand that in addition to technological challenges, there are questions of ethics and societal implications that must be addressed.
To do this, companies can implement strategies and processes to educate employees about AI. The key is to demonstrate how it will augment and help us, rather than replace us.
As AI pioneer and professor Yoshua Bengio the dish, “The value of AI in the workplace goes beyond automation. It’s about increasing human intelligence, enabling workers to make better decisions, and fostering a culture of innovation and problem-solving.
This cultural aspect is crucial. The philosophy around enterprise AI inherently involves experimentation and trying new things to see what works. If a company has a culture where this is rewarded and celebrated, it is well-positioned to benefit from the AI revolution.
3. Skills and expertise
Having the right skills in place is another crucial part of core work, and that could mean hiring new people, upskilling existing ones, or partnering with other companies who can help.
As Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks told me when I spoke to him recently during my podcast“I think for most companies it’s pretty critical to find the partners who will guide you through this, otherwise they might just waste time in the experimental phase.”
While partnering with experts can accelerate the learning curve, many organizations also need to create an ecosystem that supports continuous learning and skills development. Things are changing rapidly in this area and the workforce must be prepared not only for what is happening now, but also for what lies ahead.
4. Ethics and trust
To be ready to benefit from AI, businesses must understand and have answers to the ethical questions it creates. What implications does AI have for the humans who make up both the customer base and the workforce? What will be its impact on privacy? What are the dangers of AI bias and how can we mitigate it?
This means committing to ethical practices and will often require the development of formal internal policies and guidelines. It is essential to have processes in place to regularly audit and review how AI is used and its impact.
ChatGPT’s creators, OpenAI, have put in place safeguards to minimize the risk of its products being used to cause harm to society – by enabling violence, hatred or discrimination, for example.
Over time, it is likely that these standards will evolve. It is therefore important to put procedures in place to understand the evolving impact of AI on our lives, and to adapt our policies and safeguards to adapt to these changes.
5. Data management and protection
Data is the fuel of AI, and for it to be effective, our data must be robust, complete and clean. Inevitably, this involves technical data management skills.
Whether we work with information held on-premises or in the cloud, or take a hybrid approach, businesses need to understand the technical aspects of collecting, storing and processing large amounts of data.
As Hicks points out, today anyone can use an AI chatbot interface to start taking advantage of AI. Those who want to lead, however, must be able to differentiate themselves. From a technical perspective, this means having a better, more efficient, and more robust data and analytics infrastructure.
We must also be able to ensure its safety. Particularly when storing personal data (often the most valuable data), allowing the possibility of a breach can result in heavy business and regulatory penalties, as well as a catastrophic loss of customer trust.
This involves implementing strict data governance policies that address privacy as well as regulatory concerns, as well as providing clear protocols for data storage, collection and sharing.
Ultimately, a mature and robust approach to data management is a key element in ensuring that a business or organization is ready to reap the benefits of AI.