AI Strategies Are More Than Just Zeros and Ones

AI seems to be everywhere. As a nation, we have been investing in AI through both public and private entities since the 1960s. Today’s AI is more accessible than ever, and the promise of computers back in the 1970s may be coming true—it is easy to interact with through conversation.

The field of AI is vast, and CEOs who are thinking about how to incorporate AI into their business strategy are often paralyzed by where to start. Their CXO technology leaders may start with the tactical—focusing on what the technology solutions available are and deploying them in pilots or shot-gunning them across all employees (e.g., Microsoft Co-pilot).

However, AI is impacting more than just the technologies a company uses; it is reshaping how our countries, economies, and society will work. As you contemplate your AI strategy, I believe you must incorporate the following into it:

• Nation-State AI
• Human Augmentation
• Upskilling / Reskilling Your Employees
• Return on Investment
• Ethics and AI

Each of these topics will inform not only how you build your AI strategy but also how you think about your business in the 21^st century.

Nation-State AI

AI is being viewed as a competitive advantage for Nations, not unlike a Nation’s natural resources. As you set your own company’s AI strategy, make sure you understand how your country is embracing AI. Do they have a strategic framework that factors in where they are investing in AI talent pools you could tap into? Are there policies or regulations you have to factor in, such as privacy, data sharing, or age limitations? What innovations or research and development are being made available? Are there any public funding sources that could be available?

No different than tax or trade strategies, factoring in your Nation’s AI framework will help ensure you are taking advantage of the investments, laws, and regulations your country is putting in place.

Human Augmentation

AI is not going to replace your workforce anytime soon. However, starting today, it can augment your workforce. From putting information at the fingertips of your staff to driving automation of rote tasks, AI can be used to maximize the minutes in every hour of the day. Microsoft customers can use Co-Pilot to summarize documents, create presentations from PDF or Word documents, generate images, or generate code. Using Co-pilot features in Microsoft Dynamics can simply simplify the proposal process for a new client or reduce customer service calls by creating online chat experiences that start to mimic real-world customer service agents.

Only your limits on creativity will limit how you can augment your staff with AI. Think through how AI can enhance data sets to reinforce decision-making, aggregate information from your customer service systems, drive the productivity of your service agents, or sift through thousands of pages of legal documents to understand your supplier terms and conditions.

Upskilling / Reskilling Your Employees

For quite some time now, the democratization of technology across the enterprise has been occurring. It is not just your IT department’s responsibility to enable AI capabilities for your employees. However, to do this, you have to not only retool your employee's skills but also put in place the right incentives for them to make that investment in themselves.

The first step is to educate your employees on the basics of AI, what tools are available to them today, and how to interact with these tools.

Create a prompt writing class so your employees know how to get the most out of Chat GPT tools, such as Microsoft’s Co-pilot, Perplexity.ai, Anthropic, or Minstral.

Train your software engineers on using Co-pilot to accelerate software development. Find partners or online classes that combine machine and deep learning technologies. Enhance your data scientists with tools that accelerate data modeling and analytics.

Incentivize your employees to experiment using Computer Vision to drive preventative maintenance in your plants or Natural Language Processing to create tools for your customers to get quick answers on fixing your products.

In your annual development plans, align investments in AI education and training to your annual goals and objectives so that those who choose to lean in see those efforts reflected in how they are rated and bonused at the end of the year.

Return on Investment

Finding a return on your AI investments is important to ensure the sustainability of AI in your company. A framework must look beyond just hard costs and include competitiveness, product differentiation, recruitment and retention of staff, and the long-term viability of your business.

Start by defining clear objectives for the next 12 months. For example, we want to save 5,000 man-hours across our company by utilizing AI tools. Then, put together a cross-functional team to pursue this goal and share wins broadly and loudly across your company.

I state 12-months because AI is changing so fast that it is hard to predict what its capabilities will be a year from now. You will want to give yourself the flexibility to change your objectives as your company learns how to use AI and how its capabilities mature over time.

If you start building your own large language models and are investing in using APIs from a hyper-scaler like Microsoft, you will want to understand the mechanics of the costs. Which mainly falls under operational expense as you are using cloud-based services to build your AI tools. Ensuring your CFO, CIO/CTO, and CEO are aligned on the investment, and the impact on the bottom line will be important. If the critical measure is productivity, how many hours would you want to see saved to justify the expense?

As with any new and fast-changing technology, nailing down an ROI framework is hard. However, giving your company short-term goals and the flexibility to change your framework as the technology evolves will allow you to shape-shift your AI strategy as necessary.

Ethics and AI

We are going to end with ethics and AI, as they are important pillars of your AI strategy. AI will get to a point where it will replace jobs. It will be able to deduce insights at a speed greater than most humans and will be a crucial tool to augment your business and employees. No matter, if you are using a 3rd party tool or building your own, understanding or defining how ethics are being incorporated, will drive trust in the outputs of your AI strategy.

You need to consider transparency, privacy, data protection, safety, accountability, social impacts, inclusivity, and how you will provide human oversight. These factors will help ensure that your company’s intellectual property isn’t accidentally released into the AI wild or that you don't accidentally incorporate protected intellectual property into your company’s work product.

I can see a new role of an AI Ethicist being created to help guide and govern the creation of AI or the use of AI inside of your company. They can help evaluate how a supplier of AI tools is building their AI. They can embed in your engineering teams to educate them on ways to ensure ethical AI is being addressed.

It will be paramount to be comfortable asking these types of questions of your suppliers or your teams. The last thing anyone can afford is an AI that is deemed unethical.

In closing, having an AI strategy that can evolve with this fast-changing technology will position your company to take advantage of this societal-changing capability. Incentivizing all layers of your organization to lean into and learn about AI and put it to good use will ensure that your company stays competitive in its markets. Those that move early may even enjoy a blue ocean level of competitive advantage, serving their customers in a manner that drives loyalty, increased sales, and margin.