Does Your Company Need an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy?
Raj Ramesh
Visual Stories Drive Transformational Change | YouTube @rajramesh | Ph.D. in AI
A Personal Analogy
To improve my health, I figured I’d exercise more and eat healthier. For the latter, I created a food strategy - that includes things like:
- Eat only fruits and vegetables
- Prepare food in advance, so I don’t munch on junk
- Have proper distribution of carbs, protein, and fats
Why is this a strategy and not a plan? Because I'm making some specific decisions about the approach I'm taking. For example, instead of buying more vegetables, I could have decided to cut down on food with preservatives, and include meat in my diet.
Then a friend tells me that avocados are the new superfood and I have to include them in my diet. Do I now have an “avocado strategy?” Such a strategy would involve my decisions around avocados like: (1) Use only organic avocados, (2) Every Sunday cut some up and freeze them because they tend to go bad fast, (3) Collect healthy avocado-based recipes and choose one per weekday to prepare, etc.
Next another friend tells me that pomegranates are good for me. Do I now create a “pomegranates strategy?” Where does this stop?
Now Let’s Talk Business Strategy
Some claim that your company needs an “AI strategy” because AI will disrupt the organization, and others claim that we don’t because we can’t have a plethora of strategies around each and every thing - like data strategy, cloud strategy, block chain strategy, big-data strategy, product strategy, marketing strategy, and the list goes on and on.
Strategy is the one of the most overused and misused words in business.
The word strategy is one of the most overused and misused words in business. In my guesstimate, I’d say that 90% of strategy is not really strategy. The essence of strategy is about making decisions - do we do this, or do we do that? If you already know what to do, then writing down the steps to achieve that goal is simply a plan and not a strategy.
With that background, we know that AI will impact an organization. So businesses need to figure out how to react to that. The first question is, “Where do you want to use AI?” To improve customer experiences, or to improve operations, or to improve your products, or to gain market share, or something else. “All of the above,” is not a good answer. That’ll just result in a lack of focus.
"Let's do it all!" is a lousy strategy
Use AI to Enhance Your Company's Competitive Advantage
Generally, if your company's competitive advantage is its product suite, use AI there. If your company's competitive advantage is its distribution system, use AI there. If your company's competitive advantage is its customer relationships, use AI there. You want to use AI to push your competitive positioning even further so your competitors will have trouble catching up.
After you’ve made the decision on where to focus, you need to figure out how to bring in AI into your organization. Are you going to build the skills within, or are you going to outsource and/or partner with a vendor, or, are you going to have a mixed model? What about the technologies themselves? Where will the AI systems be hosted? And what about the AI expertise? Will it be centralized to one department with a mechanism to let other departments “borrow” expertise, or will the skills be distributed across departments given each the authority to hire and manage AI talent themselves?
Making business and technology decisions about AI is the essence of AI strategy. Planning comes once you know what you will be doing.
Given the inevitability of AI, your company has to make these decisions. These decisions essentially form your AI strategy. Whether you choose to keep them separate as an “AI strategy,” or roll them up into a broader “technology strategy,” is up to you. Either way, you have to answer these critical questions.
About me: I love to write about, doodle on, and teach artificial intelligence and architecture topics. Please follow me if this is of interest to you and checkout my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/rajramesh
Images from Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/en/umbrella-yellow-black-white-1588167/
https://pixabay.com/en/pomegranate-open-cores-fruit-196800/
https://pixabay.com/en/appetite-avacado-avo-avocado-1238256/