Playing to Win? Audit Your AI Strategy.

AI is going to transform our businesses, our communities, and our world.?

It’s full of potential, but unless we direct that potential—unless we understand the opportunities it offers in a strategic, long-term way, we’re not going to give ourselves a competitive advantage.?

Playing the game well requires a strategy. But how do you formulate one?

Where To Play, How To Win

What does it mean for your organization to succeed? Do you think everyone would say the same thing??

Consider asking your teams the following questions - how many of them can answer them??

1. Who is your future customer?
2. What is the strategy to meet their needs?
3. How are you personally contributing to the strategy’s success??

These three questions address the strategic issue of where we will play and how we choose to win. Ensuring alignment across teams is essential in working towards a Generative AI strategy. I've asked these three questions in hundreds of settings (conferences, executive workshops, board meetings, you name it), and I’m often met with an awkward chuckle. It can be difficult even for small teams to answer these prompts consistently! However, alignment is a vital part of your audit. Without it, it will be difficult to articulate a coherent AI strategy that aligns with your long-term business goals.?

The Four-Question Audit?

If you’re aligned with your core business strategy, you’re ready to move into conducting your generative AI strategy audit.?

As you ask and answer the following questions, keep your goals front and center. You want to:?

• Ensure that generative AI supports your long-term strategic objectives
• Understand the most significant opportunities and gaps
• Prioritize your actions and resources?

Question 1: What assumptions underpin our strategy?

Assumptions about how the world works underpin every strategy. Align on your assumptions by considering these questions:?

• How will our customers’ needs evolve?
• What actions will our competitors take?
• How prepared will our leadership and teams be?
• What new entrants will come into the space??
• What partners will we need to develop??

Reaching alignment on these assumptions is critical to your audit, mainly because these assumptions inform the following question/step.?

Question 2: What key opportunities and threats could disrupt our assumptions and business model?

For this, we turn to trends. Of course, trends are not static—they are constantly changing and require flexibility in strategy. But trends are helpful predictors, and the following steps and questions help you hone in on strategy:?

• Identify four or six external trends influencing your business.
• What’s the impact of generative AI on each trend??
• What opportunities do they create?
• What threats should you mitigate, either now or later?
• Select trends you can understand and act on.
• Take a premortem mindset: Anticipate failure points (from tech, failure to see opportunities, blind spots, etc).?

Because generative AI is a neutral technology, its power and impact depend on how our customers, competitors, and employees use it. Focusing on opportunities and threats, then, packs the biggest punch.

Question 3: Do we have the capabilities and resources to win?

Considering strengths and weaknesses can go a long way, but I like to be more granular in my approach. To assess whether you have the capabilities and resources to succeed, consider:?

• Your aspirations and goals. How can you apply AI to support them??

• Leadership and culture. The most successful organizations are leadership and culture forward. They’re steered by those actively involved with AI and, not surprisingly, are marked by a failure-friendly culture. Evaluate both your leadership and your culture.?

• People. Do your teams have the required skills and mindsets? Do they have the ability and agency to take action? Have your operations teams captured best practices?
• Data. Data is the foundation of everything you do with generative AI. What is the unique data you are putting to work? Who has access to it? Do you have good data governance??

• Technology. What is your relationship with technology? Are you using off-the-shelf tools? Are you doing minor customization, or must you implement a custom solution to achieve your goals??

Use your responses to help develop your strategy and competitive advantage. You might even consider creating a chart like this to get the most out of your assessment:??

Don’t think small. Take a strategic approach—think big, act small, and scale fast.?

Question 4: What are the measures of our strategic success??

People often ask me how to best measure the success of generative AI. I’m a big believer in having one set of key performance indicators—one set of metrics to run your business and assess your generative AI success.?

Remember, your AI efforts are primarily going to support your existing business efforts. They’ll enable you to do the things you already do with incredible speed and creativity. Try keeping them as consistent as possible. You’ll want to:?

• Develop metrics to provide tactical updates on progress.
• Ensure that everyone understands the big-picture objectives.?
• Experiment to determine if metrics align with goals, if they’re causal or correlative, etc.?

I’ve done strategy audits with several companies, so if you’re interested in learning more, please contact me—I’m happy to support you however I can. If this information was helpful, consider attending my upcoming (free!) webinar on Wed. May 8th at 10 am PT, Developing a Winning Generative AI Strategy for Competitive Advantage . This hour-long session promises to be packed with pragmatic steps and best practices to propel your AI prowess to the next level.

I wish you all the best in pulling together a strategy and auditing it against your existing business goals.?

Your Turn

What are you doing to ensure your generative AI efforts are supporting your business strategy??