A Strategist's Guide to GenAI Integration: Foundation

Surprising absolutely no one, I've spent a lot of time this year thinking about generative AI.

Like most writers, I have concerns. Like most tech professionals, I have expectations. Like most marketers, I have questions. I Have Thoughts. It's put me at an interesting intersection, and it's confused the heck out of every algorithm I interact with.

There's a cautious optimism to my approach. It is possible to be both intrigued and excited by the possibilities of this technology, and to have questions and concerns about the environmental impacts and human costs, both long term and short term, of using it.

By and large, I think we're on the bubble between generative AI being a toy and it being a tool. A toy is fun and enjoyable and can be used without too much structure; a tool requires careful thought and guardrails for responsible use. There are things we can all do and steps we can encourage our companies to take that will make adoption and use of this tech as ethical and useful as it can be.

Build a culture of curiosity?

Ah, the part that is both fun and terrifying - making sure that teams and companies are set up for long term success. Building a culture of anything requires time, resources, genuine commitment, and effort at every level; any one of those things can be hard to come by and all four at once can feel like unobtainium.

But it doesn't all have to happen immediately or all at once. The best thing about living in interesting times is that we can all embrace our inner 4 year old and ask why at every opportunity. Ask how this will help, where it can benefit people, how it can impact teams. Ask if there's a better way, and encourage everyone around you to do the same. There's a tendency to believe that if something isn't perfectly planned out it either can't work or shouldn't be introduced when in fact the best thing to do is get started and learn from any mistakes made along the way.

Creating an environment where everyone feels safe to ask questions and look for new solutions is essential for the long term health of any team, and as a massive side benefit generative AI technologies require that kind of creativity and interest for adoption and impactful use.

A culture should be a living, breathing part of the organization; it not only should but must change as new information is introduced, and it won't come together perfectly. But there are so many great benefits in starting now from wherever you are to build the kind of environment where adaptability, innovation, and interest in learning are prioritized and rewarded.

Lay a strong foundation

Now we get into the more actionable. You need a set of guidelines for generative AI use at your company, or at the very least within your team. These guidelines need to be written down and easy for everyone who needs them to find and understand.

With so much new information arriving daily in the field of generative AI, there will never be a 'perfect' set of guidelines and there's unlikely to be a 'close to perfect' time to get started - the field is, quite simply, moving too fast for that. It is, however, a perfect (see what I did there?) opportunity to embrace uncertainty and do the important thing anyway. Understand up front that all the decisions you make are going to need to be revisited regularly and start figuring out your rules of engagement.

If you haven’t already, create a board or a council to decide on company standards and best practices around generative AI use in general. Understand who at your company is ultimately in charge of decision making around these tools, including but not limited to:

A) How will you disclose to your audience when generative AI has been or is in use;

B) what generative AI tools are your teams allowed to use at work; and

C) under what circumstances are they allowed to use them.

If you intend to use generative AI for content generation, are teams allowed to use it only for outlines or edits? Can it be used to evolve a piece, or just to iterate ideas? If it’s being used to create fully fleshed out articles, where will you disclose that AI was used in writing the piece??How will you communicate to your customers when AI is being used in general?

Trust is incredibly important to building relationships, and disclosing when AI is in use is going to become more critical as it is integrated more frequently into common tasks and frequently used platforms. It's my personal hypothesis that people don't mind new technology, they mind being deceived about when that new technology is being used without their knowledge. Being honest and open about this tech should be best practice.

It’s also important to decide in advance who oversees the evolution and enforcement of your standards; generative AI, like life, comes at you fast. With a technology that moves as quickly as AI has started to, you will need to make changes quickly to stay current - figure out who is going to do that and when to save angst and trouble down the road.

Write it down and share it out??

Here's my number one suggestion: genAI policies should be clear and simple, because they're no good if they can’t be easily understood.?

Strip out all the fluffy terminology and be ruthlessly uncomplicated in your language. Keep things straightforward, direct, and as brief as you can make them. We've all had the experience of receiving a 20 page PDF full of dense paragraphs, and I'd be willing to bet money that nearly everyone has a desktop folder full of the ones we're going to 'read when there's a free moment, or before the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first'. If it's impossible to condense your guidelines down (and it might be, depending on your industry and legal team), put together a top sheet with the most critical information.

Once your policies are documented, get them out to your organization. It’s important that they be widely shared and accessible to everyone at the company.?Critical side note: make sure that wherever you choose to host them is, in fact, accessible to everyone at your company. Silos and gates pop up in strange places, and an 'Access Denied' screen is nobody's friend.

Now that your guidelines are out in the world it's time to give people a chance to react and ask questions. If you have a company all hands meeting that's a great opportunity to share (and to make sure that everyone really truly without exception knows where the guidelines live). The best way to get people to adopt a system is to involve them early and often in its execution and evolution.

Those of you who have designed and implemented strategic initiatives before will recognize this phase: this is the time when at least three people will ask excellent questions that you don't have the answer to and didn't even consider. These questions, and all the others you'll get, provide a great place to start working on the next phase...making sure you don't overstuff the walrus.