AI Strategy

Synopsis

Want to stay ahead of the game with AI innovations? As automation takes hold of more job functions, businesses need to develop the right tools and skill sets to stay efficient and competitive. This AI Strategy presentation reviews Upskilling Opportunities, Corporate Use Cases, AI-Integrated Product Mix, AI-Enabled Customer Journey, Intelligent CRM, end-to-end automation capabilities, innovation hype cycle, and many more tools that can be downloaded and customized to various business needs. Let's review how these tools work, and how each one can turn ambitious ideas into reliable execution.

Upskilling opportunities

Many job functions will, with enough time, be automated. As this happens, it's important that your employees can continue putting their skills to use. Use this Upskilling Opportunities table to brainstorm how to repurpose the talent pool and continue to offer career growth. (Slide 9)

On the left side, identify the role's current labor supply and demand and automation potential. Keep tab of any existing skills that can be transferred to future roles. On the right, list the possible upskilling options. It'd also be helpful to show how much each option matches the role's existing capabilities.

Corporate use cases

This Corporate Use Cases breakdown visualizes how AI tech and tools can be integrated into departments and their specific job functions. In this Marimekko chart, the bigger the box, the greater the AI use case. When it comes to AI corporate use cases, think of it as a meeting of process improvement and digital transformation. (Slide 5)

For example, for a risk and compliance department, tasks like scenario analysis and threat detection could be very suitable for AI-integrated solutions. List your organization's departments and their functions on this Merimekko chart.

As an alternative visualization, this slide uses tables to itemize the business value and feasibility of various use cases. You can score each area on a scale of "none" to "very high" or use a numerical scoring system for more precision. (Slide 5)

AI-integrated product mix

While AI can optimize an organization's internal workflow, its impact can also be made on the public-facing end. How would you integrate AI into your products or services to delight customers? And how would you visualize the degree to which each old or new product is powered by AI?

On this product wheel, the products or features listed on the outer edges tend to be more AI-driven. Level 1 is for offerings that reliably generate revenue for the time being, and level 4 includes experiments that could potentially be the big billion-dollar ideas. Take Google as an example. Many of its products already have some degree of AI capacity. For one, Google Maps uses AI for its Driving Mode feature. With this tool, communicate with your team members, stakeholders, or even customers on the exciting possibilities ahead. (Slide 23)

AI-enabled customer journey

Realistically, not every business is ready to tackle full-on AI products just yet. But even with the existing customer base, parts of the customer journey can be automated — think chatbots for customer queries or virtual shopping assistant. Using this AI-Enabled Customer Journey tool, see how automated your service currently is, and plan how much more you can do in the coming years. Say you run an ecommerce business. You may already use a chatbot for customer queries. But could you use AI to better predict customer preferences and offer new product suggestions? (Slide 27)

Intelligent customer engagement (ICE)

Staying on the theme of customer experience, the Intelligent Customer Engagement tool — or ICE — compares two stages: the use of AI today, and the use of AI tomorrow. In this hypothetical scenario, we have a business that currently uses up a lot of resources on call centers. But the plan going forward is to automate that area and cut its spending by half. (Slide 28)

End-to-end automation capabilities

So far, we've talked about how AI can be leveraged on both the enterprise level and the customer level. Now, let's bring them all together into an End-to-End Automation blueprint. (Note that every AI use case will be applicable to your business goals over time, so add or take out any of them based on your focus areas.) (Slide 29)

• On the left, consider the in's and out's of your product offerings and how they impact the customers.
• On the right, plot the ways that your organization's internal processes can be upgraded to meet higher market expectations and demands.
• Last but not least, understand that AI integration still needs to be complemented by an organic, human dimension for it to be a truly helpful and synergetic system.

Hype cycle

Many exciting new technologies go through the journey of a Hype Cycle. Here, the AI Development Hype Cycle graphs out the general expectations about the technology over time, from skyrocketing growth to an eventual plateau. The graph's X-axis represents time. The Y axis represents expectations about AI. In other words, how excited people are about it as a force for change. (Slide 21)

Plot the current AI strategic focus of your organization on this graph and where they fall on the curve. This is indicated by the purple points. Additionally, you can plot the strategic focus of your competitors. Are they reaching for the peak that gets all the public love and attention, or have they already moved into the trough of disillusionment?