The Gen AI Tsunami: The Growth Mindset Occurs Between Order and Chaos

Should you read this article? If you are leading innovation, yes. If you are facing innovation challenges, yes. If you are willing to innovate and grow your company, yes. Otherwise, no.

What do you need to remember from this article? Mindset is everything; order versus chaos; big data, once simple and organized, generates valuable insights to grow.

The 3 Topics

1. Many know that the Gen AI mindset should be data-driven, but few face what limits their organizational culture from thinking this way.
2. How to avoid complexity in AI projects?
3. Do you want to leverage your Gen AI with market data, or do you want to find insights on your historical data?

Why am I writing about this? Despite the topic being a priority, I write this article because a recent graph (below) struck me at Collision Conf with a message behind. This moment shares my values, making it almost an obligation to share my thoughts. Chaos precedes order, and order precedes chaos. As Jordan Peterson says, change occurs between order and chaos. It is a never-ending circular movement, where both are always afloat. The ideal place is to be right in the middle between order and chaos. The metaphor here is to face the chaos to innovate and bring order to our company data to leverage Gen AI.

It is frustrating to see the number of people and companies that do not question things nowadays. When you do not question, you don't challenge the chaos, avoiding innovation, and when you don't innovate, someone else does. I wrote another article where I explain the challenge of leaders living in inertia, not being able to think out of the box (here).

Living today in Canada, deeply studying AI and following the epicenter of innovation and transformation in countries that invest the most in AI like the US and Canada, I share my thoughts. AI was mostly democratized at the end of 2022, and therefore I conclude that, indeed, in the next five years, the evolution of the market and its products will be enormous in terms of customer intelligence and experience, productivity, and innovation. It is now time to look at the present, understand where we are, and prepare the boat to surf an upcoming tsunami. AI projects are mostly in the adapting and testing phase, facing chaos to organize data to capture its value in a useful way. We are still about to exponentially increase its capacity for intelligence, exactly like the representation of the graph. The consequence over time is increasing our potential for handling data, treatment, and generating valuable insights for our own business. That means if we transmit values of simplicity and organization of our own data, there is an intrinsic value to leverage business growth.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) leaders recently commented that less than 15% of AI projects are being completed successfully, which confirms this graph timing, and that is why I stopped for a moment to understand this chaos momentum and bring order values to speed up growth. Let's go to the 3 challenges:

1. Many companies still do not share a data-driven mindset. Some teams do dominate, but it is not yet a common value across most areas of a company;
2. Organization is a value that needs to be ruled by governance. If there is no governance, we are close to chaos;
3. Insights require strategic thinking and a growth mindset.

Solution and Provocations

1. Does your company share the ability to adapt and change? Does your team use a growth mindset, data-driven for decision-making?

Everything starts with the company’s mindset; without the right mindset, innovation gets sick. Not everyone has the courage to face changes, right? Change requires stepping out of the comfort zone, resilience, and vulnerability. The mindset change occurs when we enter chaos and seek transformation, acquiring the ability to adapt. Reflect: "Change occurs between order and chaos." Leaders with a fixed mindset are limited to change. Companies willing to innovate with Gen AI need to find or prepare leaders to understand their organizational limits to innovate, prepare them to face the chaos, allow them to question, understand data to find patterns, and understand the importance of the moment. Ordered data allows us to find correlations, and facts, drives us to tangible conclusions, and proves rational answers through numbers. By the way, learning textual models is based on a mathematical data world behind.

At these times, the secret for growth mindsets, also agile and focused on decisions through data, lies in simplifying. Simplify to speed up, and focus on what really matters. Simplify enables a path to the new. The simpler, the more accepted the change will be, as it becomes viable. Is your leadership part of this value? Do the various areas of your company share this common value? If not, my thoughts about leaders' roles are to inspire and be the example to influence innovation in organizational culture. It doesn't mean that thinking simply is superficial, no, the opposite, it's deeper on what really matters behind the data.

Most employees should be trained for adaptation and innovation. These values of simplicity and being data-driven will unlock a growth mindset and compose an organizational cultural change to drive AI opportunities. Decentralizing the construction of data thinking is fundamental to a company's culture.

2. Does your company manage data in a way that facilitates inclusion in a Gen AI? Are the data captured, treated, and saved properly?

AI is fed by data, existing ones, or new captures. Companies with long lives and scaled products are close to benefiting from data patterns. After a cultural mindset strength, organization becomes a priority. With the mindset and the quest for order, we face change. We move from chaos in search of order. It is essential to identify, recognize, and accept what needs to be organized in data. The greatest value lies in the ability to organize your own data into a proprietary base and develop a continuous process of data construction. This will allow you to feed proprietary AI systems and get faster answers about correlations and patterns that are intrinsic to your own company insights. Even if you are not a multinational with the ability to invest in large GPUs for data processing, many cloud solutions are emerging, allowing you to handle your data efficiently and affordably, but for that, we need to be prepared. If the data are not organized, your company will hardly ride the wave of the graph. Thus, organization becomes an AI value too.

What are the data treatment habits executed by your company? Does your company have a solid commitment to data governance? To keep organized requires the implementation of robust governance and modernization practices in data collection and management, which is essential for the effectiveness of AI models. Order in the house equals the success of Generative Artificial Intelligence.

3. Strategic thinking to leverage historical and upcoming data insights. Is your company evaluating the potential of data strategically?

So, mindset, data, simplicity, and organization allow strategic thinking over insights. Consequence: Higher efficiency, new sales opportunities, upsells, customer intelligence and experience, new product discoveries. Developing strategies to leverage intellectual data property is crucial to maximizing the value of Generative AI.

How are these strategies aligned with the company’s growth objectives?

It is essential to involve a company's vision and mission with what the company seeks to achieve over Gen AI. Leaders and teams need to be highly involved with the synergy between AI projects and the company’s OKRs (Objective and Key Results). Strategic thinking is fundamental for organizational transformation and achieving maximum value from Generative AI. To gain insights from a broad database, we can use language models and data science to identify correlations, trends, improvement needs, new products, upsells, reasons to increase LTV or reduce churn, and much more intrinsic value.

Having said that, I don't believe AI will take human jobs, but I believe humans with AI knowledge will take others without. So it is important to invest, learn and train to understand how big this tsunami is going to be.

Therefore, transformation will occur with clarity about cultural values, essential for adaptation and evolution. The path is to build a culture where all employees understand the importance of data, simplicity, organization, and use it strategically to drive transformation and growth. Companies that will ride the wave of Generative AI will be those that undergo a true cultural transformation, which goes beyond simple technology adoption. It is a deep change in the company’s mindset, values, processes, and strategy. If there is no growth mindset, it will be difficult to surf the wave. AI technology is just in between the order and the chaos.

If you like my thoughts and provocations, I invite you to read more on my blog. It is in portuguese now but soon in both languages (use google on page translator):

https://blog.stefanofrontini.com/

Best,

Stéfano Frontini