How to introduce AI in your enterprise?

Every trade show you go to and every product demo you see, there is one thing in common. AI. Our intelligent brain rightly asks if there is a lot of hype here?

John McCarthy, a computer scientist coined the term Artificial Intelligence in early 1950's. So why now? Why didn't AI pick up steam in 1950's? It is because AI which is the capability of computers to simulate human behavior intelligently is extremely hard.

With advent of big data, better computing power and revisit of neural networks and other machine learning techniques, AI is back again.

AI is no longer a passing fad although there is lot of hype. It can fundamentally change the business models of many companies and change how companies operate.

If you are new to AI and want to introduce AI in your organization, how do you go about it?

Let me get the basic things out of the way first like senior management buy-in and the need for a champion to introduce AI. These are a must for any long term initiative.

Once you get the above out of the way, you need to have an AI strategy around the following which we at WildFire have come up with. We call this the three Cs AI strategy.

1. Customers

2. Competition

3. Cost of doing business

Your AI strategy should revolve around these three Cs on a high level. This means that any use case you pick or any problem you try to solve using AI should have a direct (not indirect) affect on any one of these three Cs.

1. Customers: How can AI make your customers’ experience better? How can it add more value to them? It does not matter which industry vertical your business belongs to, making your customers' experience better is a very good use case for AI. Customer segmentation, cross-sell, up-sell are some of the use cases.

2. How can you beat your competition? In this digital world, your competition is a constant threat to your business and its business model. How can you beat them? Using the huge amounts of data you have, you can develop insights using AI to enter new markets, to bring efficiencies in your supply chain, to develop new products, etc.

3. How can you control the cost of doing business? Using AI, you need to think of ways to automate more, increase efficiencies and thus reduce cost of doing business. RPA is a dumb kind of automation and not really AI. We will talk about this more in the video series I will be adding soon.

Pick small use cases around the 3 Cs and do a POC. It can take few iterations to get this right.

I will be doing a video series based on this 3 Cs AI strategy and will discuss use cases in different verticals. So keep an eye for more updates from me.