Creating a strategy for success for AI adoption
Guest blog by Anna Lewis, Principal Consultant at Atkins
Don’t dive in headfirst to that AI purchase, says Atkins Anna Lewis, take a strategic approach instead.
The UK Government’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy1, launched in September 2021, recognises the ability of AI to increase resilience, productivity, growth and innovation across the private and public sectors. The ten-year plan to make Britain a global AI superpower encourages businesses to unlock the power of AI and data-driven technologies, harnessing the technology to help ‘make the UK a(n) … AI-first economy’.
But if your organisation is keen to realise AI’s potential, before you dive in headfirst and buy that shiny new AI system, stop! The first step on the journey to successfully adopting AI is to understand what its implementation will actually mean to your business. Any investment, rather than being technology-led, must be based on an underlying strategy – one that understands the drivers behind your purchase, and details the key strategic outcomes that your AI implementation must deliver.
We all interact with AI daily, through our social media, music and film choices, online banking, email filters and virus protection. It’s true that the technology has enabled revolutionary innovations in many sectors, and its power and potential will be a key enabler for many industries in the future – helping them to do things more efficiently, quicker and meet their customers’ needs. But technological research company, Gartner, predicts that 85% of AI projects will ultimately fail to deliver on their intended promises to business, due to lack of preparation and a data science skills gap2. So, for organisations looking to invest in AI systems to transform their business, preparation is key to success – understanding how the technology can help achieve your desired strategic outcomes and deliver organisational goals, by transforming processes and capabilities and empowering people is essential, to fully realise its potential and value.
Data-driven wisdom
The core value and potential of AI lies in its ability to draw insights from your data that haven’t previously been identified, discovering the knowledge in ‘big data’ that humans can’t find easily through data gathering and analysis alongside triage and prioritisation. Converting data to information can be done more quickly using AI, allowing you to gain insights, and to use these to put into practice the wisdom that can only be applied by humans to support your decision-making. Understanding where you can use AI to maximise an individual’s or team’s output will help you to take full advantage of the benefits of AI.
Because while the transformative potential of AI is vast, its prediction and automation most benefit the organisation when used to enable and empower its people, rather than to replace them. Through cutting down time-consuming tasks it gives your workforce more time to enhance their decision-making, applying their expert understanding to add value to their role or function, and
delivering and achieving better business outcomes. While AI can, of course, support people to do their existing jobs more effectively, it also drives innovation, allowing you to develop new, cutting-edge ways to achieve success.
Approach to adopting AI
In order to realise these successes and your business ambitions, your strategy will need to act as a guide and roadmap to your adoption of AI. Simply buying a single AI tool or service is unlikely to solve your organisational challenges: in fact, it may create more problems than it solves if you don’t have a clearly defined strategy behind your purchase. So how do you approach your strategy, to ensure it is successful? AI’s disruptive, transformative nature means it changes so rapidly that we have found it requires a different way of thinking. A classic ‘five-year plan’ approach to strategy will be out of date before it is even published. Instead, alongside your long-term vision, you will need a ‘requisite’ strategy to create an environment in which effective AI adoption and integration can happen.
Setting out a holistic approach to strategy development, which has people at the heart of your investment decisions and identifies your key enablers to success, will lay a solid foundation for you to make the most of AI. Understanding the art of the possible – including appropriate governance of your AI and future behavioural outcomes that may need to be developed as a result the technology igniting demand – will provide the flexibility and adaptability that responds to the needs of your organisation as it currently operates. Your requisite strategy should be in just enough detail to adopt the most appropriate approach to take for a specific period of time – a timespan that may be shorter than that addressed by a conventional strategy. As the environment changes, an iterative approach will be needed, to assess what is requisite for the current time, enabling you to keep pace with the rapidly developing capabilities of AI.
Footnotes:
¹ From Defence Digital blog: https://defencedigital.blog.gov.uk/2022/07/31/the-defence-ai-centre/
² From Gartner, Feb 2018: Gartner Says Nearly Half of CIOs Are Planning to Deploy Artificial Intelligence
