24 Oct 10 reasons why you should have an AI strategy
In this article, we review the top 10 reasons why you should have an AI strategy. Artificial intelligence will be such a significant business change driver, that you can’t afford not to have an AI strategy. Everything else will be too unprofessional. The alternative to an AI-Strategy is to act blindly and make ad-hoc decisions about factors that have the potential to redefine how you run your business.
- AI will be a more significant tech-revolution that the InternetInternet was
- AI has the potential to change the premises on what it takes to run your business
- Your competitors probably have a strategy already
- You don’t know if global tech is aiming at your business
- A data scientist is a scarce resource, so you want to use them where it makes the most sense
- AI will replace of 40% of all jobs – you need to start planning for that
- You can get more business using AI
- You can make your organization more efficient by using AI
- You can gain new insights into your business by using AI
- AI is an ongoing learning process. The faster you get started, the longer you get
AI has three main branches: It can be an assistant to you. This is often seen in BI where predictive analytics can help boost the quality of the analysts that you can produce. AI can also manage an individual customer dialogue in the form of chatbots. This has the perspective of redefining how you do customer service. And AI can make qualified decisions on how to run your IT-systems. Making it great to send out emails, manage production flows and much more.
Each of these areas has room for creating features or replace functions in your company that be on a distrupion level.
But you can not do all, so you need a strategy to guide your focus to the area where excelling with AI will have the most significant impact on our business.
AI and jobs
So, let me not beat around the bush. Jobs will be made redundant because of AI. McKinsey did a recent survey that concluded that 45% of all jobs could be automized. McKenzie looks at different parameters that will determine whether a lob or not. Their point is that it is not the job itself. It is the automation of tasks.
They looked at 2000 different job types, that had 18 different capabilities, that could be categorized into three main groups:
- Sociale: Social and emotional output
- Cognitive: Logical reasoning and decision making
- Physics: Navigation and mobility
The found that AI tech can replace 45% of the 2000 different job type, with an overweight in the cognitive areas. Even with the level of AI tech that we have today.
There is even a website that lets you know if your job is at risk to be automized. It is called:
willrobotstakemyjob.com”.[1]
So. AI and a job conflict are genuine, and as a manager, you need to work with this perspective of running your business. And that includes having a strategic perspective on how you plan to manage the human-machine job clash.
AI will be a more significant-tech revolution than the Internet Internet was
To claim that Artificial Intelligence can facilitate more change than the Internet did is admittedly a bold statement.
However, if you look at the perspectives on what the technology has the potential to do, then it is by no means unrealistic.
The main reason why AI will be so big is that it can create organizational change by challenging the basic premises on how tasks can be solved in an organization.
AI can do this because it enables you to automate knowledge and automate decision-making. The consequence of this is that AI is going to solve the tasks currently carried out by either jobs, processes, and IT systems.
And, it is the sum of such tasks that AI will take over in our companies. As well as the increasingly complex jobs that AI would be able to carry out, which will enable AI to create organizational change at a level that would never be possible before.
An example of this might be a voice-based chatbot that can pick up the phone and keep a qualified conversation with someone at the other end. For example, the booking of a table in a restaurant (see this video for just such a case)
An example of knowledge-driven technology could be the technology behind self-driving cars. The software behind them is based on advanced AI algorithms. And the changes that they will be able to drive are at a level of higher change potentials than data-driven technologies.
Read more in this article that compares AI-driven change with the change that you can achieve with a Digital Transformation process.
AI is fast moving up from being a tech feature to something you need to look at from a strategic business perspective.
According to a survey done by Adobe, 47% of all mature digital corporations already as an AI Strategy and 27% of the non-mature companies does too (Source: Cmo.com).
So, c-level leaders are already taking Artificial Intelligence seriously, and some even tread it on the same level as their digital transformation efforts. Read more on why so in this article.
PWC in a recent study also concludes that successes with AI require a different skillset, tasks and mindset. So this all calls for a culture of organizational change. Because AI is not a tech issue, is it a broad business issue that can change how you run and operate your business in many aspects. And this should be included in your AI strategy as well. You can see the complete PWC report as a 25 page PDF document here.
Your competitors have an AI strategy
So, there are reasons why so many (including your competitors) are in the process of making their own AI Strategy. And very few reasons why you should not.
The sooner the better
Working with AI is very different from how you work with conventional IT. For one thing, AI must med trained based upon your data. The results from AI is knowledge, not data as you get from a regular AI system. You can read more on this concept in this article.
The consequence of AI being different from IT is that you need to treat AI differently. If you work with AI in Business Intelligence, then AI will function as an assistant that makes you make better decisions. You can also use AI to replace customer interaction by using chatbots. This changes the dynamics of your company too.
So regardless of the areas in with you apply your AI, it will require that adapt your work processes so that you utilize how AI works the best. And this will be a learning curve for all organizations. And as with all kinds of learning. The sooner you start, the better you will become in getting the best out of it.
