This is Part 5 of the series "Generative AI for Business Leaders"
Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to transform businesses and industries. But before diving head first into adopting AI, companies need a practical plan. This guide outlines key steps to prepare your business to successfully leverage AI. Before you dive head first in generative AI, it is important to understand and prepare for using AI and ML technologies in general.
Clearly Define Your Business Objectives
The most critical first step is to clearly define your business goals and problems you want AI to help solve. Consider where you want to create the most impact and what specific, measurable outcomes define success. For example, a manufacturing firm may want to optimize production while a consumer brand aims to increase customer loyalty through better experiences.
Understand your current capabilities - strengths, gaps, and needs - relative to your AI objective. This helps determine where to focus first. A company new to AI could first train staff in machine learning. One with strong data science skills could move faster to application development.
Identify The Data You Need
Next, identify what data you need to meet objectives and potential sources. It could be internal, external, proprietary, or open. High quality, differentiated data is ideal. For instance, a pharmaceutical firm needs rapidly updated molecular and biological data for drug research. A retailer wants sales, economic, industry trend, and customer data to improve demand forecasting.
Select The Right AI Systems
With your needs defined, research systems that best fit. Consider :
Data formats - What inputs and outputs does the system require? Text, visual, other?
Refresh rate - How often does the data need updating? Daily, monthly, real time?
Implementation - What resources are needed to integrate the system? How complex?
Scalability - Can it easily scale with your growth?
Transparency - Can you understand how it makes decisions?
For example, a design firm may want an AI system skilled in 3D modeling while a retailer wants a chatbot with natural language capabilities.
Find The Right Partners
Developing AI in-house requires substantial expertise and resources. Partnering with vendors can provide turnkey AI systems, data help, and technical support to accelerate implementation. Consider partners' reputation, experience, customer service and pricing. Top cloud providers like Microsoft, Google and Amazon offer AI services. Specialized vendors can also help.
Prepare Your Team
As a leader, help your team understand AI to address fears and become champions of adoption. Provide a sandbox for experiments, without business risk, to spark innovative ideas. Foster a culture of responsible experimentation so all contribute to AI success.
The Bottom Line
Following a plan to identify your needs, data sources, optimal AI systems, partners and prepare your team will lead to effective AI adoption. The future is here - take the right steps to harness its potential.
Sources
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/global-survey-the-state-of-ai-in-2020
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/07/are-you-ready-for-ai-adoption
[3] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/analytics/using-ai-ethically-responsibly-business.html
[4] https://medium.com/rbni/a-managers-guide-to-ai-adoption-3301a86daea3
[5] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-managers-guide-to-working-with-ai
[6] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/workforce-of-the-future/library/artificial-intelligence-ai-business.html
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