Before You Get Into The Complexity of AI

Written by Timothy Figueroa on September 20, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Before you get into the complexity of AI you should dial in your approach to developing and prioritizing AI use cases. Align AI strategy to the corporate strategy and priority so AI use cases make sense to that organization.

The full value of AI implementations, for an organization, are not realized unless the manager responsible for AI in the organization aligns AI strategy and use cases to the corporate strategy and priority.

There are many examples today of AI implementations that bring value but are not linked to the Corporate Strategy and Priority of that organization. The result is difficulty understanding and measuring the value of the AI use case to that of the organizations goals and priorities.

This may come about where a leader hears about a cool AI technology like “Generative AI” and they want that implemented in some fashion in their line of business and then they accomplish this objective.

The lack of AI strategy alignment to corporate strategy and priority misaligns the AI use case resulting in AI implementations whose values are hard to assess in the context of the overall organizations KPI’s, its customers, lines of business and more.

Where AI use cases are carefully aligned and planned with the Corporate Strategy and Priority in mind it is easier to assess the value pre-implementation, in the short term and the in the long term. Aligned AI Use Cases may then, in time, become a jumping point for new products and services as the organization gains confidence in the AI space.

An alignment example might be, where the top corporate goal is to “better serve customers”. Drilling into this may mean, to the organization, where the customer interacts with the current corporate website and the portal does not support natural language queries for targeted information retrieval in a self-serve way and customers today bypass the portal and phone customer service instead, asking for the information wanted.

The impact of this portal deficit to the organization is that they maintain a larger customer service staff, support training, and maintain infrastructure; who are tasked with processing customer information query requests manually.

The possible AI use case that proposes to solve this deficit may be to enhance the current website by implementing an AI powered information retrieval feature that is easy to use and is self-serve. The AI solutions may be varied but the AI Use Case would be aligned to the corporate priority, would make sense to the organization garnering broad support and would solve a known problem. The AI user case would be measurable in terms of the current KPI’s used to measure performance.

Where the AI Strategy is linked to the Corporate Strategy, management at all levels can assess value and priority prior to any AI use case approval. As well, management would be able to articulate AI use case deliverable expectations, and how these expectations may enhance the existing environment, talk to impacts to the customer or organization, the market, possible effects to product and service offering and, in some cases, impacts to their industry.

Before you get into the complexity of AI, consider your AI strategy and use case approach. Think about linking your AI strategy and use case development to the Corporate Strategy and Priorities of that organization, this will assure alignment, measurable value, and organizational support. I believe this to be the first step to AI success.