Should You Act on AI Now?

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past year, you're likely aware that AI is becoming unavoidable. Sooner or later, every business will need to address it. The pressing questions are: When? And How?

Timing is straightforward: the sooner, the better. Many have already begun, so they’re slightly ahead. However, when you consider the bigger picture, it's clear that everyone is still in the early stages. But this window won’t stay open for long. The AI landscape will look dramatically different by 2025, and even more so by 2026. By then, latecomers will find themselves at a significant disadvantage.

The more interesting question is HOW.

On a personal level, anyone can experiment with various AI tools, but integrating AI into an organization demands a more structured approach. Leaders will need more than just the suggestion, “Let’s buy ChatGPT for everyone.”

A successful AI adoption strategy must include the following stages:

1️⃣ Strategic Alignment - AI initiatives must align with the business strategy and overarching goals, which requires the buy-in and support of C-Level executives.

2️⃣ Problem Validation - AI is a tool, and no matter how advanced, or how cool of a technology, it’s ineffective if it doesn’t solve real business and customer problems. Identifying impactful use cases for AI is crucial.

3️⃣ Solution Validation - Before committing to serious investments in AI (including models, infrastructure, tools, and training), it's wise to test the waters with a few quick, functioning proofs of concept.

Completing these steps—with top-level endorsement and working proofs of concept—makes it easier to develop a detailed roadmap and advocate for further investment in large-scale AI deployments.

At this point, you might be thinking: 1) this all seems like common sense, and 2) how do you actually implement these steps in practice?

Implementation

The most challenging part to tackle is strategic alignment—yes, it sounds like a buzzword, but it’s critical—because this phase involves engaging with senior, often opinionated stakeholders who are expected to make big decisions about AI and their business, typically without a deep understanding of AI’s capabilities.

The biggest hurdle here is avoiding guesswork, which can lead to “AI theater”—akin to its well-known, older sibling “innovation theater.”

Partnering with an AI expert — not one of the many that popped up recently, but someone who’s been in the field for over a decade — we created the AI Opportunity Mapping Workshop. This one-day session is designed to educate leadership teams on AI capabilities using real-life case studies, and then leverage these insights to identify, assess, and prioritize AI opportunities tailored to their business needs.

Last month, we conducted this workshop in New York with one of our leading clients for a C-Level audience. By the end of the day, the group was able to confidently outline and prioritize their initial AI projects — effectively bridging the gap between executive decision-makers and practical AI applications.

Once strategic alignment achieved, it’s time to uncover real business and customers problems within one of the opportunity areas selected by the senior leadership. At this stage we go down a level engaging the middle management in a Problem Framing Workshop to define clear problem statements and ensure problem validation.

Then, it’s time to develop AI solutions.

Cross-functional teams comprised of domain and AI experts will address the selected problem statements. Over four intense days, following an AI-powered Design Sprint process, they will ideate, prototype, and test their AI solutions with real customers, ensuring solution validation.

What makes this approach work:

✅ It’s guided by actual AI experts, removing guesswork and avoiding AI theater

✅ Structured methods for each stage: AI Opportunity Mapping, Problem Framing and Design Sprints. This makes the process easy to understand, implement and repeat.

✅ The right stakeholders are involved at the appropriate time and stage: senior leaders for strategic alignment at the organizational level, middle management to define problems at the business unit level, and front-line domain experts to create solutions.

✅ It’s fast, cost-effective and mitigates risk - from nothing to tested AI proof of concepts in 2 to 3 months.

If you want to learn more about this approach, join our webinar, “Start with AI, the Right Way” during which we will go into more details on how we do things.

July 30th, 2024, 17:00 CET / 11:00 AM ET
Hosts: John Vetan (Design Sprint Academy) & Gianluca Mauro (AI Academy)