Want to use AI in your organization? Slow down!

It seems like everyone is trying to jump on the AI bandwagon.?Certainly, many persons are considering how to best use AI for the benefit of their business, products and customers.?To me, that is like trying to figure out what a baby should do with his or her life before its even an adult.

Like a baby, AI is still in its infancy.?It still has to mature, be educated, and be technologically sound before we can rely on it for much of anything.?But, that does not mean that we can't do things to get ready for it.?For example, we can learn about and start to use Generative AI - which is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other media. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics.

We can learn about Generative AI,?test drive it, and then start thinking about how we can use it to our benefit.?I see that happening in two ways:

1. Learn about it: As an individual, you can get online and enroll in a free account on ChatGPT.?This will enable you to experiment with Generative AI so that you can begin to see how to interact with it.?Most important, you will need to learn how to ask it for things - or how to prompt it for information.?The more precise and more detailed your prompt, the better its information.?So play with it and have fun… no pressure, and its free!
2. Test drive it: From a business perspective, I recommend that companies focus on how they can use Generative AI to enhance business workflows as opposed to getting creative with their products, services and customers.?This way, they can learn and get ready for the application of Generative AI to the business.?As a side benefit of doing this, they will have enhanced business workflows.

IT owes it to the business to be faster and better at providing technology services.?So, lets focus on that.?Let us take a look at our IT processes and see how we can apply Generative AI to improve things.

As an example, take a look at something that IT architects do a lot… that is, an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA).?When architecting solutions, we almost always have to research various technology products that can be employed in the solution.?We then analyze each of these products to see how well it stacks up to our requirements.?The product that meets these requirements best is then selected as the one to use.?

That describes roughly how we all do this.?Depending on how thoroughly we do the research and the analysis, this can be a time consuming workflow.?Personally, I have seen an AoA take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months.?And then, one can question how thorough the research was… and how biased it was!!?This is where Generative AI can be used to help us out.

We can use Generative AI to do the research for us.?Given a thoroughly prepared prompt, ChatGPT can do the research of alternatives for us in minutes.?With another prompt or two, it can do the weighted comparison of the alternatives to help us identify the best possible alternative.?Done right, we can reduce the time it takes to do the AoA and vastly improve the quality of it!

So I think that it is in the best interest of each IT organization to examine its various work streams and see how Generative AI can be used to improve things.?I suggest starting this with your EA teams and then using them as consultants to help the rest of IT to get on board.?In fact, I would set up a Generative AI consulting service within the EA group to provide Generative AI implementation assistance to not only the various IT groups, but also to the business stakeholders.

Did I say consulting service??Tutorial services should also be provided by the EA team.?Once we get persons comfortable with using Generative AI to enhance our workflows, we can then use our collective skills to fry bigger fish by using it to design better products and services - though for that, we need to get the technology to be a bit more mature and affordable.

I, for one, am now focusing my professional skills as an Enterprise Architect to help EA teams employ Generative AI to enhance their workflows and provide Generative AI consulting services to the rest of IT and their business stakeholders. If someone in your organization is not doing that, you do run the risk of struggling to catch up - or worse - of being left behind.

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