Think Big, Start Small: Strategic AI Use Cases

What can your organization actually do with generative AI?

It’s a good question to ask, even if it seems silly initially—after all, you can do so many things with it. But that’s part of what makes AI tricky—with so many options, where do you begin??

And even more importantly, what is it all for?

Make Your Efforts Count

We know that AI has the power to transform. We also know that it’s an investment: It requires time, resources, and attention. It’s all the more important, then, to make your efforts count and invest your time wisely.

The biggest mistake I see people make as they roll out AI is they start with very specific tasks. They often look at things from a functional perspective, when what they really want to be thinking about is strategy.?

Imagine you’re in marketing, and you’re considering how to use AI to create content. Of course, that is a great use case! The problem is that it’s not necessarily filling a gap in your strategy. Instead of jumping right into tasks, begin by asking yourself a few questions:?

• Where are we today??
• Where do we want to be in the future??
• What are the gaps we need to fill to get there??

If you haven’t done a strategic audit yet, now would be a good time to do so. It’s only in assessing your business strategy (and the gaps that such a strategy helps you pinpoint) that you can best leverage the power of AI.?

Six Gaps, Six (AI) Solves?

In my conversations with company leaders about where to focus their generative AI efforts, I’ve seen six consistent areas emerge:

1. Revenue growth and market expansion. New product or service development? AI can help with that. Market intelligence, forecasting, and customer acquisition and retention are also top of mind.?

1. Operational efficiency and cost reduction. AI is great at being efficient. Many leaders are focusing on using AI to help automate or optimize more processes, manage the supply chain, or help with resource allocation and scheduling.?

1. Customer experience and satisfaction. A competitive market has executives considering how AI can help them personalize and customize products and services for their customers. Plus, AI is perfect for customer feedback—it can synthesize that unstructured data so you can integrate it back into your operations.

1. Employee engagement and productivity. When it comes to engaging, hiring, and retention, AI has a lot to offer. There are so many opportunities to enlist AI to support training, development, and collaboration.

1. Decision-making and strategic planning. Decision-making is difficult, but with AI it doesn’t have to be. AI can help gather and analyze data to support better scenario planning, risk assessment, competitive intelligence, and benchmarking.?

1. Cybersecurity and privacy.? This final area is top of mind for executives and boards. How can companies protect the information that their customers, employees, and partners have shared with them?? Threat detection, data protection, and ethical AI development are also essential considerations.

With so many use cases to choose from, these six areas are a helpful place to begin. One additional benefit is by focusing AI on existing business issues, you also have existing business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to measure how effective AI is at addressing them.?

A Deeper Dive Into Capabilities

Across these six areas, there are three common groups capabilities that AI has: cognitive skills, functional assistance, and data-driven support.?

Cognitive Capabilities

AI excels at absorbing and analyzing vast amounts of knowledge. As an organization, you want to leverage these capabilities across key initiatives to address strategic gaps. Consider the following:

• Perception and Understanding. AI enhances perception and comprehension through natural language processing. It offers computer vision and image recognition, along with synthesis and speech recognition.
• Reasoning and Decision Making. AI can process information, draw inferences, and provide recommendations to support decision-making. Of course, ensuring transparency in AI's decision-making process is crucial.
• Learning and Adaptation. We learn over time, and our AI should, too. Organizations must facilitate this ongoing learning and model updating.
• Creativity and Generation. AI can transfer style, adapt content, design, and innovate. But to do so at its best, it needs guardrails and constraints, especially to align AI-generated content with design and branding principles.?

Functional Capabilities

“Hands-on” tasks get a significant boost with AI. Here are some of the ways you can leverage AI functionally:?

• Analysis and Insights. AI allows us to mine data to look for patterns and gain predictive insights that would be difficult to grasp manually. It enables continuous competitive intelligence gathering and benchmarking data analysis.
• Creation and Generation. Beyond simply creating content, AI supports ideation by brainstorming new products and designing them. It can provide personalized product recommendations, tailored specifically to customers or employees.
• Automation and Optimization. AI can automate workflows and processes, and it can optimize them through process mapping and schedule optimization. It removes tedious manual quality assurance tasks while consistently making sure you get better results.
• Interactions and Communication. AI powers chatbots and virtual assistants that get better at understanding user needs and intentions. It bridges communication gaps not just across languages, but also across different industries. This allows for highly personalized messaging and feedback, tailored perfectly to the audience.

Data-Driven Capabilities?

As you look at your strategic capabilities, where does data come in? How important is it in helping you bridge your gaps??

Of course, you may not actually have the data you need—but AI can help with that! Consider:

• Data Acquisition and Preprocessing. A key consideration for many organizations is sourcing the necessary data — whether through techniques like web scraping or data crawling. It's important to assess if the acquired data is clean, accessible, and normalized. AI can augment data by generating synthetic data to fill gaps or creating digital twins to expand the data pool for more comprehensive analysis.
• Data Integration and Management. With large data volumes, organizations must decide where to store it all and how much historical data to keep. AI can help integrate data from multiple sources by matching fields that may be labeled differently across schemas or databases. Tracking data lineage, provenance, and origination determines reliability.
• Data Analysis and Modeling. This stage focuses on which data will be used to train AI models. Validating model performance is critical, especially when it comes to minimizing bias.?
• Data Visualization and Storytelling. This is one of my favorite areas. AI can transform data into compelling content, like graphics, narratives, and dashboards. This democratizes data access and understanding across your organization.

Final Thoughts

I keep coming back to something my co-author Katia Walsh often says: “Think big, start small, scale fast.”?

Thinking strategically enables you to focus, ensuring everything you're doing with generative AI is supporting your larger goals. By zeroing in on your strategic gaps and aligning your initiatives to those gaps, you’ll ensure the highest return on your (AI) investment.

If this information was helpful, there’s plenty more! Sign up for updates and early access to my upcoming book, co-authored by Katia Walsh, which is all about creating a winning generative AI strategy.

Catch my most recent webinars:

“Unlocking The Power of Generative AI.” I explain how to set up a generative AI “playground,” three ways to elevate your leadership with step-by-step instructions, and the broad outlines of creating a strategy. Get the recording and slides here.

“Developing a Winning Generative AI Strategy for Competitive Advantage.” I walk through the steps needed to create a cohesive AI strategy that will last. Get the recording and slides here.?

Your Turn

What questions do you have about using generative AI? If you have a coherent strategy, what are you doing, and what steps did you take to get there?