Why Shaping an Adaptive Organizational AI Strategy Matters

Embrace Change, Define the Future!

The rapid growth of AI in business not only indicates its significance but also presents a promising future. Unlike the race to the moon of the 1960s, businesses are driving a largely unregulated workplace paradigm shift that has garnered the interest of political leaders globally. The impact of AI in the last five years is substantial, with AI software revenue reaching approximately $10B in 2018 and projected to hit $126 B by 2025. PwC also calls AI the $15.7 trillion business enabler over the next few years, a testament to the potential of AI in shaping the future of business.

The potential for exponential growth from disruptive technology underscores the need for every company to assess how AI will fit into its future business strategy. The potential impact of AI in the front office is significant and promising. Activities include automating mundane tasks to enable an empowered workforce of the future. Disruptive technology also motivates workers of all levels to explore the merits of AI despite the uncertainty and the impact it might have on their future roles within the company.

The rapid pace of AI adoption among business leaders, driven by their efforts to gain a competitive edge, is leading them to set ambitious targets without a clear understanding of what they are aiming to achieve. If that were not bad enough, the implementation approach employs an agile methodology, which, although effective, leaves more questions than answers, ultimately disillusioning the entire workforce. In the race to the top, there is a pressing and urgent need for a more thoughtful and strategic approach to adopting AI in the workplace, a decision that will shape the future of business.

Adopting an Adaptive Organizational AI Strategy

An adaptive organizational AI strategy considers and examines all levels of the business. Overall success is measured by analyzing the benefits across all the stakeholders globally, including society and the environment. The technological shift is not just a phenomenon for big businesses; even small businesses must plan for AI and embrace it wholeheartedly. The overall vision must establish sustainable, measurable, and responsible AI practices that deliver tangible and intangible results that matter. 

The word adaptive denotes that a sensible AI approach for the organization cannot be devised by focusing on one function in the operations. Instead, it must empower an inclusive team and devise a practical, meaningful AI approach that aligns with the company's stakeholders. The company must also recognize its limitations and, when required, hire the right subject matter expertise from prominent consultants, who can also help the team bring in industry best practices and serve as a critical sounding board.

Adopting an adaptive AI strategy will help mitigate uncertainty in the future. There are five elements to develop an adaptive AI strategy. Each of these components can maximize the company’s unique competitive insights and harvest its intellectual property. Ultimately, AI will become an integral part of the company’s DNA, effectively driving value to the stakeholders, enabling inclusive innovation, and adopting responsible and sustainable AI in their respective industries.  

Visualize a Firm Foundation with Boundaries.

Creating an AI strategy on a solid foundation with clear expectations is essential. If core goals are not established, the company will lack a unified approach, and before business leadership knows it, they will have spent money without any clear outcome or expectations. When devising the AI strategy, the business team must be careful not to scatter resources over a broad spectrum without any clear vision or measurable outcomes.

For example, a retail company might want to attract more customers and enhance its omnichannel experience. Identifying specific goals to achieve the desired results becomes focused, allowing the team to measure progress based on a clear set of objective criteria. The intent is to overcome a boiling-the-ocean mentality. The team must always establish incremental value for the company, one objective at a time, or at least harmonize events to create a means to finish what has been started and leverage feedback to build upon future events in a highly disciplined manner.     

Identifying and prioritizing use cases typically adds the most value to the organization. Establishing goals aligned with the organization's core business goals builds upon an existing vision and allows business leaders to share results in a common language with all stakeholders. Rolling out AI must be a transparent evolution that engages everyone at all levels with a clearly defined set of deliverables and scope.

Establish an End-to-End Foundation in Data and Infrastructure

An effective AI strategy must leverage trustworthy data devoid of bias for all learning and a well-thought-out infrastructural backbone to support it. Data quality is the most important critical success factor. Accuracy, accessibility, and cleanliness are vital to augmenting a meaningful AI approach. A management-defined data governance hierarchy and enterprise data management business processes are crucial to maintaining an impeccable layer of quality in all the designated AI models in the organization.

One of the most significant factors hanging over an AI strategy is how to invest in the required infrastructure to create and sustain it over time. Factors such as thought leadership, data storage, raw computing power, AI platforms, and licenses must be secure and scaled to meet business needs. Many businesses lack maturity in the IT space and consider leveraging IT service companies to navigate and align to a sensible approach that shifts capital expenditures to operational expenditures to avoid the burden of trying to remain relevant with the latest technology.

Build a League of Talent and Expertise

AI is not just about technological innovation. It is an amalgamation of overlapping human-based talent that balances the need to deliver business outcomes at a pace on par with the market’s insatiable demand. Building the right team of subject matter experts requires many skills, working collaboratively to unify around a common purpose. AI expertise is in high demand at all levels; therefore, it is imperative to recognize and plan a strategy to hire, train, maintain, and retain the necessary talent to align with the desired outcomes of the organizational AI strategy. The goal must also foster a culture of continuous learning, ensuring employees remain committed to the organization and drive ongoing continuity and competitive advantage.

IT functions no longer resemble those of the early 2000s. Ten years ago, who would have thought AI would help us monitor food inventories or recommend recipes based on the contents in our refrigerator at home? AI ingenuity has no boundaries, and the workplace must nurture and encourage innovation at all levels. Exploiting innovation involves leveraging cross-functional collaboration and addressing the misconceptions and fears surrounding AI to achieve healthy and productive outcomes that benefit stakeholders. Human employees are not going away; they are driving the future through simplification and ingenuity.

Maintain Key Performance Indicators and Strive for Ongoing Continuous Improvement

Direct feedback and measuring against pre-defined success criteria are imperative for an AI organizational strategy. A forward-thinking approach should incorporate measures at the grassroots level, including measuring AI’s performance at a business and technical level. The methodology must incorporate critical business measures such as return on investment and time-to-market. At the operational level, process automation rate and defect reduction measures help to understand AI’s impact on output and overall efficiency. Measuring the quantity and quality of new products and features due to AI also measures the company’s quest for innovation and organic growth.

Ongoing feedback to improve AI helps the organization to identify, iterate, and adjust to fine-tune the operations. Routine assessments on progress and goal achievement help management make the necessary changes to continually optimize and harmonize the business processes associated with AI and tweak the AI tooling to the desired expectation. The team should set up the approach to fail fast and drive output through agility, as well as clearly defined stories to facilitate an environment focused on continuous improvement.

Set Ethical Standards in Place as the Foundation for Success

Implementing an ethical framework that considers equity, and diversity is essential in establishing an adaptive AI strategy in the organization. Leaders must relinquish their role as the sole authority and acknowledge that a data-driven organization is founded on facts, diverse input, and inclusive thought leadership.  The intent is to ensure collaboration across the organization, and fairness, transparency, and accountability are interwoven throughout the AI strategy. The goal is to assess the ethical implications of AI decisions and how they might impact customers, workers, and society.

The focus on establishing the foundation includes an end-to-end governance framework that oversees the entire lifecycle of AI initiatives. An empowered governance team must establish, at a minimum, policies regarding data privacy, security, and compliance that adhere to the existing industry and governmental policies. The multilayered data governance approach must also continually evolve and improve to adhere to policies that align with society and disruptive technological evolution.

Making an Adaptive AI Strategy a Reality

Every good strategy is accompanied by a comprehensive strategic plan that outlines the proposed AI strategy, vision, objectives, and roadmap. Collaboration is essential for success; therefore, it is imperative to assemble the stakeholders across the enterprise to align and obtain buy-in. The team should not just be reserved for section and organizational leaders; it should be an inclusive team of thought and operational leaders with the necessary insight to drive the desired outcomes.

Ownership and responsibility should be clearly defined, and an empowered decision-making organizational process needs to be implemented to allow the team to work seamlessly across business units and geographies. The intent is to encourage participation across the company and leverage data to shape and influence the approach. Rolling out informational awareness and communication plans ensures transparency and encourages everyone to participate and contribute to the success of the engagement.

Establishing prototypes and measuring the efficacy of pilot projects gathers critical insights and showcases AI's value. Iterating and leveraging lessons learned help refine the approach. Validating use cases helps build momentum and effectively link to more significant and broader milestones. Pilots can also help provide insight into how to scale and roll out the AI strategy across the remaining enterprise. Incorporating learnings and developing best practices helps streamline and validate the approach.

The ethical guidelines and the governance team serve as a waypoint, ensuring adherence to the necessary policies and capturing and updating critical findings as AI begins to find its place in the organization. Ongoing learning and routinely reacting to advancements in AI help solidify a business process that manages and adapts to change. The approach emphasizes ongoing learning and inclusive thought, highlighting the critical role of operational leadership in the business's overall success.

Activating the Idea in the Organization

In the future, AI will either become part of an organization’s DNA for growth or a virus that systematically destroys the company's fabric and success. The call to leaders of all businesses, large and small, is to implement an adaptive AI strategy. An all-encompassing AI strategy is not just predicated on embracing disruptive technology; it is putting in the necessary discipline and focus on it to ensure it becomes a fundamental part of the business’s DNA.

The word adaptive denotes that the organization is committed to and sold on the premise and promise of AI, how it changes the fundamentals of the workplace, and how it seamlessly wraps around operational processes. Adopting an adaptive AI strategy means embracing disruptive technology and data-driven decision-making. Organizational collaboration, inclusive innovation, and overall responsibility for using AI will help to set a catalyst to future-proof the company from competitive threats and encourage the drive to hyper-personalization and a customer-first approach.  Change and fickle customer expectations are inevitable in the future. The only thing that matters is whether business leaders will accept the promise of AI and implement an adaptive strategy that holistically becomes their new operating model and vision.

The question is no longer whether AI will reshape one’s industry. The focus is whether the business will adapt. Commit to crafting an adaptive AI strategy now to future-proof the company’s competitive edge.”

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