You should be thinking about how you’re going to infuse AI throughout your organization from day one. That’s one reason to start with a large number of small projects, rather than a single big one: many small successes will mean much more to stakeholders than one big success, and certainly much more than one big failure. We’re telling you right now, some of your new projects will fail—that’s true in any area, but particularly so when you’re taking on a new technology. If you’re going to take advantage of AI, you need to use it everywhere; you need to push it into every department, every business process, every activity, and make your workflows intelligent.
C-suite executives are turning to AI because in order to compete, they need to be able to innovate at speed. Their goals include:
- Predicting and shaping future outcomes
- Humanizing customer experiences
- Empowering people to focus on higher-value work
- Supporting human capital in their efforts to reimagine new business models by infusing intelligence into their workflows
For many organizations, the best strategy to achieve these goals is to start at the top of the AI Ladder. That sounds counterintuitive, but remember we noted earlier that the ladder isn’t perfectly linear; it’s possible to start at the top (or on any rung, really), pushing AI through the organization, and then go back to work on collecting, organizing, and analyzing your data. Here’s the trick: you don’t have to start with nothing. You can start with prebuilt AI applications that can easily be adapted to your business situation.
For an AI transformation to succeed, you have to infuse intelligence across all of your workflows. And prebuilt applications are less likely to be trapped in the limbo between the lab and production.
The work we’ve done with clients has identified five key business domains to which C-level executives are applying AI to transform their workflows. They are:
- Customer service
- Financial operations
- Risk and compliance
- IT operations
- Business operations
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