Critical Steps to Make Your Artificial Intelligence Implementation a Success

Often when a business starts to consider implementing an artificial intelligence project they think only about the technology but fail to consider the business practices and human side of the equation.  While they are busy forecasting ROI and trying to get budgets approved, they must also consider the need to train employees and other human elements that will help make their AI project and implementation successful.

In PwC’s 2020 AI Predictions report, PwC recommends five priorities to include as part of your  AI projects in 2020: get on board with boring AI, rethink upskilling, lead on risk and responsibility, operationalize AI — integrated and at scale, and reinvent your business model.

Within their report, they then make several specific suggestions that if utilized, can help increase the chances of your project being a success. Here are some of their best suggestions:

Be Strategic

Start your project by identifying where AI can have the greatest business impact within your organization. From there, you must choose to build the capabilities required to succeed. Not all of these capabilities need to be internal, as partnering with other companies, such as Artificial Intelligence Developers, can enhance your chances of success.

Often the best use of artificial intelligence can be to tackle tasks that humans do not want to do anyway, such as extracting information from forms, invoices, and other documentation. Also, look for opportunities to utilize AI by looking for simple tasks that occur across your organization where you have the opportunity to reuse the AI for multiple solutions.   

Upskill

For AI to be a success within your organization, you must educate your staff in a way that benefits the business. Start by identifying what skills are needed for AI to be a success and then give employees across the organization an opportunity to learn these skills, but this needs to be more than just offering training courses.

You must also give employees that complete the training programs the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned. This way their new knowledge can be turned into real-world skills that improve performance. Incentivizing the application of these new skills will increase adoption.

Create an AI Culture

AI has a better chance of succeeding in your organization if you create a new culture. Organizational leaders should start by setting a direction and establishing goals, but then they should stand back and let the people with the organization “run with the ball”. After giving employees the training and tools to succeed, employees will generally come up with the best suggestions for leveraging AI to increase productivity or revenue.

Make sure you address any fears your employees have and make sure they understand that as AI takes tedious tasks off their plates, it will give them an opportunity to focus on performing higher-value work.

Governance

For AI to be truly effective it requires businesses to trust the recommendations of the algorithms. Trust is built through effective, well-thought-out governance. A comprehensive governance program will provide support at each step of your AI implementation. It should not only anticipate risks and but also provide quality controls along every step of the process.

Your governance program should consider not only who is accountable but if the AI aligns with business strategy. Additionally, your program should evaluate what processes can be modified to improve the outputs. Create specific responsibilities to track performance and pinpoint problems. Remember that it is possible to automate many governance tasks and processes.

Trustworthy Data

If your AI is going to be effective you must ensure that you can trust your data. That means that your data must be more than accurate, it must also be labeled, standardize, bias-free, compliant and secure. If you don’t trust your data, you will not be able to trust the models based on that data. It is essential that you are relentless in your data practices to ensure you get the best results from your artificial intelligence applications.

Make sure you consider integrating data from across all departments from within your organization to create a more complete and holistic view.  Additionally, you should plan ahead to integrate your AI system with your analytics tools and other tech systems, such as any IoT applications you have in operation.

Revisit your Business Model

Artificial intelligence will help automate tasks and will assist and augment your workforce and decision-making. As your AI program gets started, make sure you regularly evaluate the value being generated and determine how you will utilize this asset and its value as part of your business model.  

Remember that artificial intelligence is not a silver bullet or a one-off solution, AI should be part of your broader business strategy that helps you improve processes across your organization. While the impact may be incremental at first, you will quickly discover it can be transformative as AI’s usage grows within your business model.

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