How Business Leaders Can Stay Ahead In The Race To Implement AI

How we change the world for the better

Yes, your products and services absolutely have the potential to change the world for the better. Here’s how:

When the internet launched, it changed how the world learns, explores, solves and shares information. Today, we are about to turn the marathon into a sprint as the full power of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace.

In 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that the global AI market was worth around $8 billion. Today, a report from PwC estimates that the global AI market could be worth around $15.7 trillion by 2030. Because of this rapid pace, it can be hard for business leaders to stay up to speed on the latest innovations, but we need to have high expectations of ourselves to stay on top of these trends,

Stay on top of developments.

Integrating AI into your business requires putting industry knowledge to work. In order to stay informed on emerging solutions like AI, I schedule meetings with myself in order to make time to review trend reports, connect with my industry networks and engage with my key industry leadership groups.

For example, in my field—the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) industry—I am seeing AI capabilities enter the race like computer vision, robotic process automation and predictive analytics, each of which has the potential to add a new level of value to my company.

More broadly, the AI conversation has been around generative AI. This powerful language model can generate human-like language on nearly any topic in less than a minute. With conversations around generative AI products—like ChatGPT, Bard and others—it is important to foster curiosity and discovery within our organizations without losing sight of the potential risks. While risk may be required to move into the lead, the importance of a cautious conscience should rarely be ignored—especially with new and emerging technology.

Develop a companywide strategy.

Once you have a strong understanding of how AI can impact your company and sector, it's important to spend a lot of time developing a strategy. Organizations should involve a diverse team of leaders to focus on building and maintaining this strategy. This will ensure that AI is integrated into your business model in a way that aligns with the target audience, overall goals and incorporates a diverse perspective into your solutions.

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Developing a diverse team of employees to follow, discuss and evangelize relevant trends also helps to develop a culture of innovation. Recently, for example, my company's innovation leadership issued a call for ideas on ways that ChatGPT could be used to expand offerings, improve current processes and procedures as well as improve response rates for deliverables. With this process, we saw more than 140 unique ideas submitted for consideration within a few weeks. These submissions are being reviewed, and several of them will likely move into the next phases of the innovation process, such as receiving innovation funds to develop a proof of concept and full-scale business plan.

Meanwhile, at the board level, many conversations are emerging concerning AI's ability to deliver value to the business. In Deloitte's recent "State of AI in the Enterprise," 94% of business leaders agreed that AI is critical to success over the next five years; however, 29% self-identified as struggling to achieve meaningful outcomes. The race is accelerating in many ways, forcing a "must-play" response before an organization is truly ready to lace up its running shoes. This is often causing significant risk for projects with a lack of "future focus" and a true understanding and support at the executive level.

Beware of common challenges.

While the excitement around AI is entering a new level of curiosity and social conversation, there are also several pitfalls that business leaders should understand.

One of these pitfalls is an overreliance on AI as a shortcut. AI should not be used as a replacement for the work done by employees, but as a way to enhance and improve the quality and speed of output. It is critical that businesses remember the value of human experience and decision-making capabilities even while they focus on hyper-automation.

As AI capabilities like generative AI become more prevalent in the workplace, we must also stay aligned with our human resources leaders to ensure our employees understand what AI can and cannot do, and how it should be used to support work. HR leaders should provide guidance to employees on the limitations of these capabilities, such as how best to use AI-generated data and the potential biases in the generated content.

Some employees fear that AI is going to replace their role or significantly change it. Establishing a culture that embraces the opportunity for technology maturity will help them understand that AI enhances your work product but does not replace human creativity and experience. Providing employees with training on AI capabilities will help them better use products like generative AI to enhance their work output and not simply replace it.

Within my organization, for example, we are proactively sharing best practices with our employees as well as basic policies regarding AI. A regular cadence of communication helps ensure awareness and expectations are clear and published around the use of AI tools. In addition, our AI policies are included within our HR Global IT Acceptable Use policy, which all employees review and sign during their onboarding process and annually as part of our compliance training.

Conclusion

The opportunities that AI can bring to clients, businesses and our global community continue to grow exponentially. Businesses that are embracing AI with curiosity and with an understanding of its limitations will be the ones with the gold medals at the end of the race.