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AI In Business

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) are taking our world by storm and many industries, organizations, functions, and processes are getting strengthened with these new technological tools & developments. All these new innovations and trends are part of digital transformation at large – helping organizations to sharpen their focus, hyper personalize their offerings to their customers, enhance the speed of data-based decision making, moving analytics and predictions to technology, backed by good quality data.

So, if machines must learn and apply their intelligence to help analyze and predict reliable trends, organizations need to ensure they understand the “why” they need to leverage these tools to meet their purpose & strategy. This calls for good quality data at volume for machines to be able to learn, analyze, predict, and proactively make recommendations for decisions.

While we take on the task of leveraging AI in business, we need to ensure that we consider the following:

How does it connect to our purpose and strategy – or are we just doing it because everyone is?
We need to be clear about “what” problems it will solve for our business, customers, and teams.
Understand the role that AI will play in our transformation journey – are we going to be an explorer, observer, responder, or an architect
The journey of integrating AI into our business is an everchanging landscape and a moving target – we should be prepared for the long haul.

As we take on the large effort of digital transformation and leveraging tools such as AI in our business, the common questions that come about include “what will be the ROI” or “what will be the business impact”. A good successful business leader is never going to support these large resource intensive efforts unless they know how these will affect one or all the following:

Customers: How will it positively impact customer experience? Ensure these tools enhance customer experiences with the organization, thereby building deeper customer engagement and advocacy.
Employees: Impact that AI and ML will have on empowering and enabling our people resources to proactively respond to market requirements and more importantly, how will these tools help take the mundane tasks away from them and allow them to focus on solving more complex problems or work at a more strategic level.
Processes: How will these tools help eliminate redundancy, easily access data, and provide analytics across different functions within the organization to speed up data driven decision making and avoiding human biases and errors.
Profits: Will the impact that AI has on all the above elements result in enhancing profits? – either through increasing revenues or optimizing costs or maximizing profits through better use of data for predictions at different levels.

It is also vital for business leaders to clearly understand that just by singing off a project for digital transformation or the use of AI / ML, things will magically change from one day to another. They need to have the big picture in mind and how technology and tools will help them get there. Leaders need to stay the course in demonstrating strong commitment to such efforts. They need to push their organizations towards preparing the ground for gaining the maximum out of technology tools and innovations.

One of the key aspects in preparing the ground to leverage technology would be to look closely, yet strategically on the data that the organization has access to. Most businesses have plenty of data, but they may either be totally unused or not easily accessible / useable. One needs to look at how data is structured currently, mined, and used for analytics. This may again require deep understanding on how the new data structures will enable us to leverage the maximum potential of the technology tools to meet the organization’s purpose & strategy.
Therefore, a key starting point to having a successful AI integration would be to first look at how our data is structured – review and restructure the data so that machines can have access to the right data, in the right quality and right structure.

While automation existed for a long while (from the use of calculators to excel to newer tools of today) and will continue to evolve taking on new dimensions, business leaders will have the choice to either embrace technology, use them to leverage their existing strengths, bridge their weaknesses or they may just be left behind. Leaders should also prepare themselves and their organizations to capitalize on the opportunities that technology provides, to be more proactively responsive to the markets and customers they serve. Failure to leverage technology at the right levels for the right purposes could be a huge threat and could even be the start of becoming irrelevant.
As mentioned earlier in this article, the need to have deep understanding of why any kind of transformation (including digital) is needed and how it will be aligned to their purpose & strategy, Leaders should also be very creative to challenge status quo and look beyond the question of ‘what if’ to ‘so what’ in the use of technology. The answers to these questions, will support the “what” and “how” of our digital transformation efforts, including the adoption of tools such as AI/ML.

Once we have a clear understanding of how technology will have strong foundational impact on how we deliver our products, services in the journey to building sustainable excellence, we should never lose sight of how transformation (including digital) will impact each of these key drivers for success of an enterprise:

Customers: Stay focused on delivering the best experiences for them – each time, every time!
Employees: Enable them to use their full potential in solving problems rather than just ‘dealing’ with them. Ensure we are focused on helping them understand how their work impacts what we do as a business and build engagement.
Processes: Make them lean, agile and support building a data driven empowered organization. This needs constant review and a mindset to learn each day and be open to change. Every single effort to use automation to eliminate redundancies will only help the entire organization to be proactively responsive and agile.
Revenues: Happy customers served by engaged employees, working in a process driven culture will naturally have a positive impact in this area and all investments in transformation will only lead to an attractive, positive ROI.

While considering digital transformation and adoption to the use of relevant technology tools (AI / ML as an example), we need to ensure that our teams do not see these initiatives just a cost savings effort or elimination of redundant jobs – but something that will allow them to grow professionally freeing up time to work on more challenging / engaging activities such as strategy, solving larger problems that machines may yet not be capable of solving and lastly defining how they will at their individual levels take advantage of technology.

Specifically in the use of AI / ML tools, organizations need to be able to differentiate and appreciate the thin line between ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ AI, where the lines keep blurring all the time. Organizations that are well anchored to their purpose and values, will be able to handle these conflicts more easily.

Business and technology leaders should be able to demonstrate their visible commitment to such digital transformation efforts – articulate the benefits that they will bring to why we do what we do and how we do it effectively / efficiently. They need to stay the course and provide active leadership direction during times of frustration / confusion. Like all efforts that have the potential to impact various stakeholders to our business, we need to have a well thought out change management plan that actively encourages all of them to adapt, adopt and benefit from the transformational efforts.

Let us leverage technology to make foundational impacts (positive of course!) on how work should get done in the everchanging marketplace!