Getting Serious About AI Transformation

You’re reading this because you’re interested in using Artificial Intelligence to transform your enterprise. You already know AI is an emerging disruptive technology that will fundamentally change the way we live and work in the future. The problem is, where to start?

You might be tempted to set up a committee and start with ethics. Sounds good, right? If societal and ethical considerations are where you plan to start, you’re not serious about implementing AI. Anyone who advises you to start your AI strategy here should be fired immediately. This is lip service. You need to get serious.

You’re standing at the dawn of a new era. Much like electricity in the early 1900’s, AI offers boundless potential, particularly in areas of productivity and human/computer cooperation. Much like the previous Industrial Revolutions, the AI revolution will take humanity to new levels of productivity and prosperity, only much faster than we can imagine.

If you believe implementing AI within the enterprise is as much a change management issue as a technological one, you’ll want to explore creating behavior change at scale using behavioral insights designed to engage the workforce. This is particularly difficult for larger organizations. Once you’ve got more than a few hundred people, it’s challenging to drive any kind of change. You distribute papers to the workforce. Sometimes they’ll read them, most times they won’t. You can send them to training. Along with being expensive, training rarely has more than a temporary booster effect with no long-term integrated change that sticks. You might turn to consultants, another expensive option; or have leadership mandate a strategy, but it’s often difficult to keep everyone rowing the same way.

The way to drive change and accelerate the implementation of AI within your enterprise is to recognize the human equation in concert with the traditional aspects that drive AI strategy. Behavioral science shows a combination of choice architecture and nudges, tiny targeted interventions, are what drive mass behavioral change within large organizations.

Your AI strategy should start with communicating your intentions to transform to an AI-enabled enterprise. This communication needs to start from the very top of your organization.