Think business, think AI.

We get it, you get it. AI is disruptive, and it's not a question of "if" but its a question of "when" your business joins the bandwagon!

Artificial Intelligence has arrived and is all set to reset the way we do business. Business as usual will cease to exist.

We have seen many businesses relinquish their top positions to competitors when they fail to innovate and move quickly to changing market or tech dynamics. In smartphone business Apple came from nowhere and disrupted the RIMs, Palms and Nokias of this planet. Rest is history.

AI is a bigger paradigm shift than Smartphones or even Internet of Things primarily because it changes every aspect of how we conduct business and our lives. Think of a scenario and you can find a way to enhance the experience with AI. AI is so pervasive that everyone will adopt it knowingly or unknowingly. Some by simply using services like Siri or Alexa as end consumers, and others by implementing AI consciously to improve efficiency or enhance experience.

What does this mean for business managers?

This means that they will be inundated by AI platforms, services, abstract implementations that solve little dinky problems and before you know you have a mishmash of services that don't talk with each other, provide silo-ed implementations and you as a business manager are neck deep in a governance mess, struggling to homogenize multiple AI solutions stacks across departments. The worst part being that these silo-ed solutions may not leverage each other to provide a unified enhanced solution. This happens time and again when we encounter paradigm shifts. We get excited and implement ill-conceived services and then work hard to resolve the resultant nightmares.You would say; Yep! been there, seen that!

As they say, every business problem has a solution. The question is do you have the right focus, time, energy and resources to get to the grandiose vision one step at a time?

Artificial Intelligence, at the end of the day its a set of technology tools with some maths thrown in that come together to assist you in conducting your business with ease. Umm ... a slight difference being - this beast can think and if implemented incorrectly, your titanic can hit an iceberg very quickly.

Well, at tringapps, we have spent last 2 years collecting data, and drawing up on our vast enterprise architecture experience, and as a result have come up with a few strategies that seem to have resulted in effective AI solutions for our customers. Here are our two cents on how to evangelize AI in your org and company:

Stage 1: Evangelize the business gains to key stakeholders, generate enough interest and create informal "what if" groups (random groups that can come up with innovation candidates) in your organization. Most business leaders like to understand the impact of the technology on their business. Using business lingo and clearly outlining impact is a great way to generate interest.

Stage 2: Set up a business Core Council (Directors, VPs and above, representation from every business unit) that meets regularly, at least once a month to discuss what others are doing in Artificial Intelligence.

Stage 3: Request all business leaders to conduct BPR (business process re-engineering) meetings within their orgs to identify candidate processes that can be AI enabled. At this stage, it's a good idea to outline tangible enhancements to processes. Roll up these process candidates in a unified list.

Stage 4: Work with "Core Council" to vote on each candidate process. Before that share empirical data that quantifies impact in each area. This is also an opportunity for you to take a leadership role in helping define AI strategy in your company. In other words, help the key stakeholders make an informed decision.

Stage 5: Once you have key process candidates in place, Publish the list and updates regularly to key stakeholders and ask for constant feedback, suggestions and critique. Co-ownership of innovation candidates results in frictionless adoption as business managers feel they are part of the change. Embracing change is difficult, with AI fear is intuitive and when leaders like Elon Musk highlight the perils, it does not help. At tringapps, we came up with a term "Assistive AI". It is as much a psychological construct as it is on how to position our AI products, and point solutions.

Stage 6: Build vs Buy decision: You build when AI is intrinsic to the products you sell. You buy when AI is an enabler and you don't have the skilled workforce that can build. Alternate strategy can be - buy, leverage and then build. If you decide to buy then key things that you look for in an offering are quite intuitive to senior business managers:

1. If you can find a comprehensive point solution that is extensible and fits your requirements, thats always a better play than purchasing platforms that are generic and require high levels of customization. Time to market is alway critical, and hence building on top of extensible vertical point solutions is always a good idea.
2. If you can't find a point solution that fits the mold, then its a good idea to look for a generic platform or a cloud service that can give you incremental changes in your candidate processes. The key is to design generic interfaces and services that can be reused across business processes.
3. Validating the enterprise enablement (security, scalability, reliability, availability and manageability) of the stack is important. Look for offerings that fit the bill operationally, not just functionally.
4. Time to market is always important for business. Collecting some quick wins requires to partner with experts who understand core AI well and help you navigate the maze.
5. Selecting a partner to work with: Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Microsofts of this world can be partnered with but they will not customize their offerings for you and their goal is to outrun their competition by providing AI enabled utility services. Their goal is not to make your business win over your competitor. Thats your goal. It is best to use platform providers for their utility services and leverage their core offerings as enablers within your AI stack. This is where AI System Integrators like tringapps, Accenture, IBM Global Services come into play. Selecting an AI System Integrator comes down to their expertise, point solutions and value. In today's fast moving economy, moving fast, building nimble max impact solutions is the key, most large consulting companies are not geared up to reorganize themselves for AI Rapid Application Development, they ask for large contracts and big commitments. Selecting the right partner is the key to implementing good innovative solutions.
6. The technology stack: Simple is better. Look for solutions that are homogenous to your technology stacks. Working with new languages, new technologies and deployments can be a challenge for engineering, and dev ops and infrastructure teams. Engage these groups early and get them involved with tech stack, their feedback is crucial for technology adoption.

Stage 7: Constitute change adoption groups in every business unit and create a mandate for the org leader to personally lead the transition. Account for training and retraining of key personnel.

Stage 8: Evaluate adoption metrics as much as business KPIs. Most successful technology and process adoptions are successful when there is intuitive and incidental participation by rank and file across orgs. User Experience and aha! moments play an important role in adoption. Ensure that the AI enabled point solutions that your teams create are simple, intuitive and easy to use.

At tringapps, we have done just that. We have qualified our AI point solutions on metrics like gains to the customer, ease of use, and amount of training required amongst others. We are ready to assist you in building a comprehensive AI strategy and solutions. Our AI enabled customer centric solutions are secure, scalable, and above all extensible and open. Our solutions can generate platform independent models, can integrate with any AI platform provider / service and can be deployed quickly to help you test the waters.

We regularly conduct AI workshops and have created a comprehensive framework based on the above listed stages to help enterprises adopt AI effectively. Reach out to us at [email protected] to engage.

Good luck and god speed with your AI initiatives.

Afterthought: Another alternate way to implement AI would be to identify a few use cases and implement a small nifty solution as a showcase. Once you have the buy-in push for a cohesive and comprehensive AI strategy.