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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Artificial intelligence is rapidly affecting nearly every industry across the face of the globe. While you may think your business is too small to invest in something like AI, the fact is that it may be more affordable than you think. Right now every company has its opportunity to take advantage of artificial intelligence to increase their revenue and decrease their costs, perhaps getting a ‘leg up’ on their competition, but don’t ignore this opportunity; the time to act is RIGHT NOW. In the very near future (10 years or less) you will see AI used widely across your industry, in ways you may not imagine, and if you are not planning ahead you are putting your business at tremendous risk.
While AI creates a massive opportunity, companies will not be able to take advantage of its benefits without putting forth effort. The executive management team must address artificial intelligence right now and approach this issue with deliberate intent. Whether you realize it or not, you are in a race to gain a competitive advantage. There will be winners and losers. Progressive businesses will gain a tremendous advantage that slower-moving competitors may never recover from. AI will create a substantial performance gap between the progressive companies that take advantage of artificial intelligence and companies that fail to adopt AI or only partially take advantage of the technology.
How does your company make sure they are on the right path to take advantage of AI? Start by creating an artificial intelligence strategy for your organization, making sure that it accounts for the challenges your business will face. One challenge that many businesses will need to address is a lack of data scientists available today. In recent years the demand for data scientists has grown rapidly, however, the talent pool has grown very slowly. This is a huge gap between demand and supply, which could leave smaller businesses unable to attract talent. Fortunately, they can turn to outside AI developers that are experts in the business to help them with their needs.
Other factors that your business should consider to ensure that you come out on top include artificial intelligence education for your organization. Take a deep dive into successful use cases and compare them to those that are unsuccessful. This will help your organization start looking for use cases that can propel your business forward. Additionally, you will want to share with them thoughts on how to overcome obstacles and how to create a path from a concept to a valuable software tool.
Each artificial intelligence project that your company undertakes should be able to create a measurable impact on revenue or customer experience. Consider potential applications and then rank the potential use cases based on both their feasibility and projected value. Applications that have a high projected value and a high degree of feasibility should be the first you integrate into your business systems.
Make sure you consider how you will monitor and govern these systems. Machine learning models tend to drift over time and the data you are inputting can change, so make sure you have a plan to govern your machine learning applications. Your company must create guidelines and tests to protect itself from inadvertent bias or errors. Check regularly and make sure that your AI application is working as expected.
Right now is the time for your organization to start thinking now about how to leverage AI as a part of your corporate strategy with a plan to utilize it to transform your organization. Creating and working with artificial intelligence should be second nature to everyone in your company, giving them the confidence to look for potential use cases. An empowered workforce will generate a multitude of ideas that can generate successful AI applications that drive earnings and improve the customer experience.
Decide right now that you want to propel your business forward by leveraging the power of AI. This means utilizing artificial intelligence to assist in more effectively running your business and providing you with a competitive advantage. Start by identifying opportunities within your enterprise to significantly impact revenue with AI. Select the ideas that are justifiable based on projected value and practicality and execute these projects to push your business forward.
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Whether you are hiring a professional mobile app or website designer and developer or are a designer yourself, it is important that you approach your next redesign with the goal of solving problems.
All too often, businesses and even professional designers approach projects with the goal of creating something “fantastic” looking without stopping to think what problems are they solving or how they are helping the end users.
Approach your next redesign with the goal of solving problems
This is natural because we all want our website or mobile app to look great. However, without first considering how you will help the intended users, you may totally miss the mark with your next design and not be properly serving your users.
Start out the project by becoming an investigator. By starting out with an open-minded investigative approach you can determine how your users use your site and what problems they are attempting to solve when they are there. Keep in mind, there will be many different perspectives and developing an understanding for these will allow you to better serve all parties involved. If you don’t take the time to do this research, you may miss the mark completely or solve only for a few of the reasons that users visit your website or mobile app.
Proper research will allow you to consider the user experience holistically. You will be able to make connections between users and their goals. This will allow you to generate a truly powerful design that solves problems for your user base.
Think about designing your next website or mobile app like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Doing research is similar to getting all the pieces together before assembling the puzzle. The information you gather will serve as a baseline for your project helping you understand correlations and constraints.
One of the most important parts of preparing for a website or mobile app development project is communicating with your partners. Talk with internal stakeholders about what they need and want from the new release. The more in sync you are with their needs the more you can make adjustments to better serve them.
Make sure you take the time to have conversations with some of your customers. Find out what they like about your current website and find out what they don’t. Look at analytics and determine why they are currently coming to your site and what they are doing when they are there.
As you learn more about what different stakeholders want and the problems that they have or are trying to solve, you may realize that those issues overlap and by making good decisions during the design phase you can help everyone involved.
Once you understand the issues, you can figure out how to balance this information, or at a minimum, you can pass it on to the designer you have hired and it will help them create something that will better serve your needs. This information should not be considered as constraints. This information will empower you with the ability to create something that solves problems and helps relevant stakeholders. By following this process it will help you streamline and improve key processes.
Develop an understanding of the short term and long term goals for the project. What outcomes are you expecting to see after the project is completed? This will help you understand what changes need to be made so that you can achieve those goals. If you design a new site only having the goal of having something more modern looking you are missing a tremendous opportunity to create something that really benefits you and your users. Are you trying to generate more raw leads? Are you trying to generate more sales? Are you trying to make information easier to find? Its hard to have a successful redesign if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish.
Think about what has already been attempted. What has worked & what has not are important to know. It’s immensely valuable to identify what hasn’t worked and the reasons behind it. Try to look beyond the details and consider why something worked or didn’t work. Dig in and understand the background context to empower you to make the right decisions going forward.
While you don’t need to code if you are having a website or mobile app built, but you should have a basic understanding of the technical constraints of the project. This will help you understand timelines as well as help you know when and where you can come up with creative solutions to obstacles that occur along the way. If you don’t have a basic understanding of the process and the parts involved you will be at a serious disadvantage while your project is underway.
Pay careful attention to you intended go-live date and make sure you are able to set reasonable milestones to make sure you are able to go live when you want to do so. Setting key milestones and understanding the work needed to reach each is important for staying on schedule. Pay attention to what parts of the project are most relevant and have the biggest impact. If you don’t know what areas those are make sure you talk to the designers and developers you are working with to make sure you have a proper understanding. Otherwise, if you start to miss deadlines and don’t have a proper idea of how long it will take to reach each milestone you may find yourself way behind and not able to make up time. Pay attention to tasks that need to be completed before other work that is to follow, it’s essential that early components are completed on time if timetables are to be met. If you have tight timelines, determine if you need to strip back some features from the initial release and focus on an MVP version.
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