Rethinking AI adoption

As we navigate the rapidly changing landscape of our world that’s being reshaped by interconnected global forces, including the life-changing power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it's time to rethink things a bit, challenge our business beliefs and explore new possibilities.

AI is presenting us with an extraordinary chance to progress five to 10 years’ worth of innovation within a single year. To navigate this AI-enabled transformation, organizations are encouraged to embrace the change while focusing closely on four crucial areas for successful AI adoption and scaling – culture, ecosystem, governance, and talent.

Culture

Culture is imperative. AI is not replacing the human; it’s augmenting roles and enhancing performance across the workforce. Consequently, organizational structures must change to align with the evolving landscape. Rigid, hierarchical structures will cease to be an effective ground for AI adoption, so a democratizing approach will be key. With AI compressing organizational structures and establishing flatter models as the new norm, organizations must remain agile and adaptive in order to remain competitive.

Talent

Talent is key because people need to be kept at the center of technology transformations. It is critical that the entire organization — everyone from the C-suite to employees and shareholders — is cognizant of AI's ability to augment work processes. More specifically, employees should be trained in order to effectively utilize AI's capabilities — "AI hands on" training is highly recommended. Driving personalized AI learning programs that align with the employee most relevant goals and tasks will be hugely important for those to know when to use AI effectively. Therefore upskilling is essential — and they need to be supported as they discover their own use cases.

Ecosystem

The ecosystem is another crucial area. Given the condensed timeline of AI's deployment due to its rapid evolution, connectivity has been hindered. Therefore, it's critical for organizations to balance risk through deploying an open ecosystem approach. This can prove to be extremely beneficial for enabling domain-specific AI, so that every function can have its own specific foundations and will require interoperability.

Governance

Lastly governance is equally important. The speed of innovation has led to a lack of safety nets. To build a solid risk management framework, it’s important to understand the probabilistic nature of AI, meaning you don’t know exactly what the technology will produce as an output. The risk management framework has to be smart enough to understand and be able to differentiate the context. The most effective approach is for AI to work in tandem with humans who function as a key means of identifying erroneous details and providing personal expertise.

The importance of these four elements cannot be overstated as they are instrumental in taking full advantage of the benefits of AI, helping businesses stay ahead in a highly competitive environment. Nevertheless, the journey to AI transformation should never be static. Stay open-minded, continually challenge your business beliefs, and always be ready to rethink and reimagine. By doing so, you're cultivating a culture of continuous learning that leads to sustained competitive advantage. Keep rethinking and keep innovating, and together, let's build a better working world.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.