Beyond buzzwords: finding your purpose for AI
I’m thrilled to collaborate with data science expert Noelle Saldana on this 6-part series.
Over the past year, AI has become the go-to topic in any social or professional gathering. AI has captured our collective imagination, and as a leader, you and your board are most likely eager to figure out how you will tap into the promise of AI at your organisation.
Before we jump into the details, we think it’s important to take a step back and ask a broader question: What exactly are you trying to accomplish with AI? Do you want to invest in this technology because it’s a way to help you evolve your products and achieve your strategic goals? Or is it more about adding the latest innovations to maintain your market share and status?
We think this distinction is similar to the difference between an artist and an art collector. The artist is the one who is covered in paint, spending hours in the studio, and potentially throwing out dozens of canvases that aren’t aligned with their vision. The art collector, on the other hand, just gets to buy the finished picture and hang it on the wall.
It is important to define a purpose for AI that is a better fit for your organisation; neither is inherently ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. If you’re not able to invest the time and deal with the messiness of being “the artist” for the sake of being the creator of the masterpieces, acknowledge that being an art collector is the better fit instead. It is essential to be thoughtful about the “art” that you end up collecting.
To discern what you are trying to accomplish with AI and how much AI investment you need to succeed, we recommend outlining:
Potential of uses of AI internally
Product areas where AI could add value
Who would own and drive AI in your org
Ultimately, ‘how much AI’ fits into an organisation is not static and can be part of an ongoing journey. It depends on many factors, including where you are currently and how much investment you can realistically make in the near term.
Spectrum of Organisational Approaches to AI
Our goal with this series is to help you understand what you need to consider to develop an AI capability as well as how to avoid the common ways most organisational transformation fails. We’ll cover the above organisational approaches to AI in more detail in a later post.