For a business to capture the benefits of AI, executive leaders should establish an enterprisewide AI strategy that identifies use cases, quantifies benefits and risks, aligns business and technology teams and changes organizational competencies to support AI adoption.
To ensure you derive value from AI, choose initiatives strategically, focusing on what your organization is trying to accomplish and the business problems you’re working to solve. For AI to really take off, you’ll need to employ AI as part of your existing application family — and that includes having data from every area of the business to power the features it offers.
Organizations at the earlier stages of AI maturity are more likely to pursue use cases around cost control before advancing to key elements of the value proposition, such as customer experience. Gartner research shows that as maturity grows, AI is applied more broadly and more impact is realized.
Key elements of enterprise AI strategy are:
AI vision.Tie AI goals to enterprise ambitions. For example, articulate how AI will enable digital transformation objectives. Outline approaches and focus areas designed to encourage and enable organizationwide fluency and adoption of AI. Get specific about success metrics.
AI risks. Assess your exposure to and mitigation plans for different key areas of risk, including regulatory (e.g., privacy laws), reputational (e.g., AI bias) and organizational (e.g., lack of competencies or infrastructure).
AI strategic action plan. Identify the impact on business models, processes, people and skills, and take a portfolio approach to AI opportunity. Assign accountability for AI strategy development and execution. Interdisciplinary teams and data literacy will be key to success.
AI adoption. Spell out the use cases (human-like engagement, process optimization, generating insight, etc.), and use value maps and decision frameworks to prioritize adoption.
Pursue buy-in to the AI program. Evangelize the initiative’s launch and subsequent successes to peers, and give other C-suite leaders the ability to tell the AI team’s stories.