While working as a startup investor and advisor, I enjoyed seeing many business ideas and pivots. For nine months, how to incorporate AI has been a constant question. The strategic discussions have enthralled management and boards. However, the only difference in many cases is they added AI to the existing strategy. No deep new plans, no pivot, just the same thing: “Now with AI!”
Artificial intelligence can provide many advantages; however, it must serve a clear objective when adding it to the business. Simply adding AI here and there or allowing departments to add it as part of the shadow IT doesn’t solve any issues. The privacy and data security risks can be significant. Thus, AI should never be an afterthought.
Thus, let us look at three critical areas where adding AI can improve your business strategy.
AI Enhanced Customer Experience
Enhancing the customer experience is one of the most common AI strategies. AI chatbots and automatic support tools are apparent solutions to most. Yet, it is also one of the most complex issues available. To speak the language of your business and the language of your customers often requires refinement or a custom model. Consequently, they range from expensive to useless.
Resource allocation will be critical if your AI strategy focuses on enhancing customer interactions. Ensuring the AI strategy has the budget, human resources, and reasonable benchmarks will ensure success.
Additionally, these projects provide a source of data for your non-AI customer success strategy. Thus, the lessons learned should enhance your customer-facing teams even if the computer-controlled augmentation fails.
Marketing Busywork
Most marketing departments produce outstanding customer success stories, white papers, and articles. Yet, the documents are often underutilized. Rephrasing and repurposing them, transforming them into social media content or additional blog posts, requires time and effort. Yet, the return value is less than creating new material.
However, Large Language Models are superb in transforming text. They excel at shortening, reformating, and adopting it for specific use cases. The last six months have brought many services with industry-specific models specializing in these tasks.
Selecting the right one and getting legal and IT to approve the selection can be done in a week, significantly enhancing marketing.
A small project like this can also help IT departments present themselves as experts in AI, especially when dealing with upper-level management and boards that are skeptical about the need for these projects. Since marketing material is published, it also serves as a low-risk test case for reviewing AI vendors. From data protection to quality of work, it is easy to examine without putting any proprietary data at risk.
Secretarial AI
From Meeting transcription to intelligent scheduling, there are many AI-based services to replace personal assistance. Since leading video conference services and calendar programs offer some form of AI for free, selecting those as low-hanging fruits for an AI or AI-HR strategy is tempting.
However, take a quick look at what employees discuss during typical online meetings and whether keeping a record in someone else’s system is desirable. In most cases, the services reserve the right to use the meeting transcripts as training data. Should you be comfortable using your product roadmap for training a third-party AI? What about the HR discussion?
While these digital assistants are technologically advanced, the data protection and privacy questions surrounding them are the least developed. There are a lot of different scenarios where employees might use the technology, which complicates the legal analysis.
However, if the compliance and legal officers have the resources to analyze the offering and create a policy, it can mean a quick win in the AI strategy. It will also be the win with the most significant impact on the workforce. After all, no one likes to write meeting summaries and work through calendars and preferences to find an open slot for the team meeting.
Resources vs. Results when Adopting AI
As it is with many cases, an AI strategy will rise and fall with the resources available to the IT and legal departments. From large-scale customer-focused projects to outsourcing copy editing, matching the projects with the needs of the company and the available resources can help make the most out of the buddying field. Whether or not part of a separate AI strategy or part of the general IT strategy, AI can support your customers and employees. However, any new technology has strengths and weaknesses, and a clear plan and priorities can help make AI successful.