Strategic AI – Business Benefits First

[Fred Champlain]

A recent Gartner survey found that 79% of corporate strategists saw AI as critical to success between 2023 and 2025.  Given the amount of attention that AI has been getting recently, the actual surprise is that 21% of strategists didn’t think that!

Business leaders must empower AI technology teams to pursue AI innovation initiatives, while providing a framework that ensures that innovation is always driving towards solutions that help create and improve customer experiences and resulting business value.  This helps ensure that innovation experiments remain focused on value, not technology, and provides the context and guidance to teams to help them deliver a more complete and valuable product or capability.

This is key for organizations if they are going to optimize their AI investments – the technology has to support corporate strategy.  There are an almost limitless number of AI related use cases, but unless organizations focus on improving their overall strategic performance they will simply be using ‘cool tools’ without adding aligned value.  That makes it critical to manage AI innovation strategically with even greater speed to market.

That must include:

• Small scale experimentation with  ‘tiger team’ approaches to focus on innovation and R&D.  These initiatives will help the organization learn and understand where AI can actually drive value to the business and customers, and help them define more formal initiatives to cultivate further;
• Establishing appropriate objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) to directly align AI initiatives with measurable benefits against one or more strategic initiatives;
• Prioritizing AI related investments while ensuring that other work can still be delivered and that overall organizational performance and the flow of value remains balanced across priorities and business needs.

For delivery teams, the connection between their work and the purpose of their work – and the priorities that they are contributing to - is essential to remaining competitive as GenAI disrupts markets at a pace not previously seen.

ServiceNow SPM for AI

To achieve all of this, and to do it in an integrated way, requires a dedicated AI strategy, and the ability to manage that strategy alongside the other key priorities and investments that the organization is pursuing.  That’s where world-class strategic portfolio management software such as ServiceNow SPM comes in, powered with Now Assist with GenAI.

ServiceNow SPM provides transparency to those leaders to understand where effort and work is being expended, and it also provides clarity to the work teams to understand how their research initiatives are designed to contribute to one or more business priorities. 

This connection between all forms of AI work and the business drivers for that work makes it easier to prioritize, fund, and deliver on more formal strategi AI initiatives.  ServiceNow SPM provides a single, centralized demand funnel for work from all sources.  AI-focused experiments will generate proposals for more structured initiatives that can be viewed, prioritized against all other work, and funded appropriately.

This helps ensure that AI is given the attention that it needs to drive strategic success, without eroding the ability of other initiatives around strategy, compliance, maintenance, etc. to deliver their own success.  Business leaders are able to model and simulate alternative portfolio scenarios, adjusting schedules, and understanding dependency impacts on everything from business benefits to resource utilization to architecture design decisions.

If you aren’t certain that you have the tools to optimize your AI investments, ServiceNow is here to help.