Tech Execs’ Top 3 GenAI Questions

Gartner’s latest research article boldly states “Our top predictions for 2024 show every strategic conversation needs to include GenAI.”?

While I agree, this is easier said than done. The big 3 GenAI questions tech leaders come to me with right now are:

• Where does GenAI fit into our org??
• How do we upskill our teams??
• How can we calculate the ROI for our CFO?

Let’s dive in.

Where does GenAI fit into our org??

GenAI is best suited to solve problems where there are clear patterns to follow, and where traditional machine learning would be too expensive, time-consuming or inflexible.? And, where workflows can be modified to save time on tedious tasks.? Two examples:

• GenAI does wonders for internal operations, like customer success teams – allowing employees to rapidly search historical customer queries and answers and list references in an instant.?
• GenAI is an outstanding match for 1 point stories for dev teams - enabling 1 point stories to be written in literal seconds, allowing tech teams to focus on more complex tasks. See how codegen can become your 1 point story dev team here.?

How do we upskill our teams??

This is a broad question. First step - identify which teams need to be upskilled in GenAI creation vs which teams need to be upskilled in GenAI use:

• GenAI creation upskilling - these are the employees who will be using GenAI tools, likely a part or all of your tech team. Best practice I’ve seen - start by building POCs (Proofs of Concept) with a static set of data, for internal operations. This eliminates a lot of factors including having to involve customers up front and having to deal with dynamic data sets. This also likely increases your feedback loops cause your customers will be internal employees. Start small, get real product into the hands of users and make feedback loops as tight as possible. Then dive deeper into areas of value.

• GenAI use upskilling - this is for the users of the tools created by the group above. This is fairly rapid - find a small group of people who are excited to learn new things, have them be the pilot group, and create a measurable outcome that, if successful, enables you to branch out to a wider group. Do not teach your entire company GenAI at once, there’s no need and it will waste time.

How can we calculate the ROI for our CFO?

Best approach here is to use past data. For example, if you implement GenAi to code all of your 1 point stories, then estimate what percentage of your team’s time was spent on 1 point stories in the past 3 months. Example: If you have 10 software engineers and they spent about 10% of their time on 1 point stories in the past month, then you can forecast that 1 person’s worth of time will be saved in the future for every 10 people working on code.