From AI Experiment to AI Strategy: Unlock Full Potential for the Enterprise with Strategy Execution

[Sankhadeep Dha1]

What's the easiest way to start with Gen AI? Many organisations start by experimenting. They set up incubation teams to experiment and monitor industry learnings, develop art-of-the-possible and share their challenges and successes with the rest. Which in turn helps in encouraging rest of the organisation to think about what they can do with this new tech.

Why is AI Experiment not enough?

Soon comes an inflection point where just experimentation is not enough. As organisations experiment with AI technologies, they often face challenges in translating isolated experiments into a cohesive and impactful strategy. In this blog, we'll explore the essential steps to move from AI experimentation to a well-crafted AI strategy, executing which drives success and delivers value. And at the end, we will show how these steps can be applied to every strategy execution.

So how do you create your AI Strategy and put it into action?

1. Start with a Vision: Ask why are you pursuing AI and what kind of value will it create for the organisation? This will be heavily influenced by the learnings from your AI Experimentation. And this is where you align your AI vision with the vision of your organisation. And most important, you will also outline use-cases which you will NOT pursue. Think about it, this is the guiding principle on how the rest of the organisation will use this cutting edge technology in an ethical and responsible way.
2. Define Clear Objectives: Align your business objectives with your AI Strategy. AI capability itself is not the end-result. Smart businesses use AI to achieve business outcomes faster and in a scale which was not possible before - for example: enhancing customer experience, optimising operations, improving decision-making etc.
3. AI Risk and Mitigation: Identify AI specific risks such as hallucinations, legal and repetitional risks. . Put in a mitigation plan for these kind of risks.
4. The role of Enterprise Architecture: Your Enterprise Architecture team is key in helping to making the AI Shift a reality. This is the team who will ensure that the technology landscape is modernised to deploy AI. How about rationalising your legacy point solutions into a few strategic AI driven platforms? - Enterprise architects will help in that too! The access to no code/low code and even pro code has been bridged for non-casual programmers with AI technologies. Which means we will see a flood of new applications popping up in every business unit, and Enterprise Architects will need a governance framework to manage this - more than ever.
5. Involve "everyone" in the journey: Although this is a strategy play, you will still want to collect new ideas, innovate and experiment on the still unknown use-cases - both from the context of products and services that you offer to you external customer and also how it can transform your employee experience. One of the biggest challenges in deploying AI is that people are not confident on the output of the AI system - primarily due to the lack of right skills to interact and derive value out of AI. And this is where educating your whole workforce on AI comes in, so that they can reap the benefits and use it in a confident and responsible way.
6. And finally the execution: This may sound easy, but many organisations still struggle to get work executed. Due to the lack of Business Agility, work and in many cases, the right work doesn't land in the right way to a delivery team's backlog. And in the age of Gen AI, this is the last thing you want. The result is that although you may have a great AI Strategy, the lack of business Agility will put the whole thing to a grinding halt.

So, why did I write this blog?

I believe that every strategy is great and it is our mission to help you in realising the full benefit from your AI Strategy and every other Strategy.

Connecting Strategy to Execution, getting everyone onboard and overcoming lack of Business Agility need not be complex when approached in the right way. In the age of Gen AI, this is more relevant for every organisation than ever before.

And this is not a challenge for AI Strategy execution alone, this is a challenge for every Strategy execution - irrespective of whether it is technology driven or business driven. And the great news is that when you solve the execution challenge for one, you solve it for the rest!

With our ServiceNow platform and Strategic Portfolio Management solution, we connect every persona who is involved in Strategy planning and execution. From Chief AI Officer, CIO, Business Leaders, Enterprise Architects, Value Stream Leaders, Portfolio Managers, Product leaders, Product and Project Teams and your Service and Operations teams, we connect them all in that journey.