AI is rapidly changing the world around us and is becoming the universal engine of execution for businesses in all industries. Artificial intelligence is expected to add more than $15 trillion to the global GDP(*) in the next 10 years and the number of AI algorithms in large companies worldwide is expected to rise to 18 billion in 2021 (see figure 1). That AI is here, and here to stay is generally known and agreed upon, but how your organization can capture the opportunities of AI and in what way this requires a different type of strategy, remains a challenge for many leaders.
Read on to discover:
- Why your business should care about AI
- Why people skills are the biggest barrier to create impact with AI
- How you can get started in building the right AI skills for your company
Figure 1: Number of AI-algorithms used by enterprises Source: MIcompany Data Science center
Why should you care?
The reason for the huge increase in welfare due to AI are the opportunities algorithms have to offer. Algorithms can replace and outperform specialized human intelligence such as pricing, diagnosing patients, the planning of supply chains and many more areas.
By successfully replacing traditional processes by AI-driven processes organizations can scale faster, innovate faster, and operate at increasingly lower costs. But capturing these opportunities is not trivial – to remain competitive in this changing world, organizations must re-invent themselves.
People skills are the biggest barrier to create impact with AI
There are multiple barriers to implementing AI at companies, and the main ones boil down to a common denominator: people. Adoption requires more than technological capabilities. Implementing algorithms at the core of the business processes means a shift in how an organization can best operate around these algorithms and what skills and roles are needed. Since most AI solutions require a human-machine collaboration everyone in the company will need to learn new skills to work with algorithms; from executives to business teams to hands-on data scientists and engineer.
Figure 2: The main bottlenecks to AI adoption. Source: “AI adoption in the enterprise 2020” survey, O’reilly 2020
Bringing algorithms to the core of the business processes leads to huge opportunities but also comes with new challenges and responsibilities. How can you lead a company that is more and more depending on AI to support its processes and decisions? How do you evaluate the prediction results from algorithms? How do you make sure that an algorithms that performs great now will continue to deliver the right results one month or one year from now?
Figure 3: Impact from AI initiatives in organizations. Source: “Winning with AI”, October 2019, MIT Sloan.
Reskilling to create value with AI starts with a common understanding
To successfully put AI at the core of your business strategy asks for a new set of capabilities in your organization. Reskilling of your people is therefor essential. MIT shows that organizations that actively help their existing business staff build AI skills are 3x more likely to generate value from AI (see Figure 3).
This reskilling starts by creating a common language and understanding: What opportunities does AI bring for my company? What does it require to build responsible algorithms that create the right business value? How can you successfully implement AI in the core business processes so that the human-machine collaboration is optimized? And what is then needed to scale and improve?
Use AI skill building as the in-house accelerator to make the change happen and directly create value for the company and the people.
Start the transformation at the top. The right steering for AI impact comes from executive teams that understand the opportunities, how to make it work and organize in a responsible way.
Read how other companies have implemented AI skill building to create impact on local and global scale by using the GAIn academy.