It's no secret that artificial intelligence is the buzz phrase of the moment, with commentators on all sides toing and froing between its economically transformative and socially unknown impact. At Afiniti, despite being an AI company ourselves, we try to avoid the hype surrounding the innovation and focus on the results.
Though many claim that AI will create massive change in one fell swoop, our experience in the business world points to incremental, rather than disruptive, benefits to enterprises and, crucially, to making humans more productive, rather than replacing them.
For almost a decade, we have been using this technology to help some of the largest companies in the world improve the quality of their connections with customers. Along the way, I've learned a lot about what businesses need as they develop a strategy to implement AI, and I recommend taking the following three steps.
1. Identify how AI can specifically help your organization. Not in a box-ticking, theoretical way but as a practical matter. What problems at hand have the highest value solutions? Are there ways in which incumbent processes can be automated or optimized? Is there a historically unavoidable pain point in operations that could benefit from big data? Don't adopt AI because it sounds good — adopt it because you have a strategic problem to solve and a targeted goal for AI value creation.
2. Pick the right vendor. This is true of anything, of course, but all too often there's a basic lack of appreciation for technical differentiation versus what sales and marketing people say. The resulting divide is one of the unhappy byproducts of the hype around AI. A simple litmus test for gauging vendor expertise is determining whether or not your vendor can explain the value of their AI to you in one sentence. If not, they probably don't understand the particular technology or its output themselves, which often indicates that there is little to no value-adding innovation at the product’s core.
3. Make a plan for measuring outcomes. Decide what success means to you and your business in tangible, defined terms, and create a straightforward monitoring strategy. Companies need proof of impact to ensure they get a return on their investments and, as time goes by, to adjust or expand AI technologies into new areas of their business. Pick key performance indicators that are core to your operational goals and track them alongside your vendor to ensure clear and consistent progress.
The world of AI is messy. There is more noise than signal and there are more snake oil salesmen than credible vendors. But implementation need not be as complicated as it seems. Treat AI like you would any other technology deployment by understanding your needs, allocating investment where it will have the most impact and carefully measuring its effects.
If more people understood the real value of AI as applicable to their enterprise, some of the grand claims made about it might just come true. Only then will AI truly live up to the hype.
