It’s the biggest buzz in business and for good reason, but let’s unpack what it means for your strategy. Every board is looking for an AI strategy from their C Suite, they want to see the promised productivity gains and cost reductions that the media have touted but where is the reality in this?
The reality is that this top down view distorts the value of AI. Most current technology vendors include what is referred to as AI (The definition is pretty loose between ML, advanced ML and AI) in their offering and indeed this has been the case for many years. These developments are built around specific use cases that are value driven and proven and continue to be enhanced as the technology evolves.
The advent of LLM’s as the poster child of AI and the mass media furore around them have changed the game from a perception perspective but the lived reality of technology continues at it’s own pace.
So…..How should companies embrace the benefits of AI and align this with their strategy?
As with any change the first and most important question is ‘Why?’. Why change? Is this going to improve life for my stakeholders, is it going to give me a commercial advantage? Then ‘What?’ What is the use case where you think this benefit will be, what process will be improved, what cost will be reduced? Without a clear statement of Why and What, AI is an empty promise; a solution looking for a problem.
Next comes the critical step of ‘How?’. You see the strategy, you’ve defined the use case; How are you going to do this? At FeatureMind this is where we spend most of our time, helping companies execute on their strategic goals and it is clear that for AI to deliver the promise it needs access to the data. Some of this data will be internal to your business, some may be external (Which comes with appropriate security concerns), but getting access to it is the key that opens the lock.
This talks directly to the value of intelligent data architecture enabling you to focus on a use case and ensure that you provide the correct data, securely within a specific environment in order to deliver.