Artificial Intelligence is seemingly everywhere these days but there are very few success stories or case studies about business improvements, particularly for small and medium sized businesses. It's generally accepted that the ability to invest in these technologies is now affordable to all businesses, that AI is "the revolution" and "anyone not using AI will struggle to compete", so why are so few companies taking advantage of the benefits?
To try to answer this, we categorised the typical conversations we have with businesses we help, which highlighted three key challenges.
- "What is AI?". People have heard of AI and likely experimented with ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude but don't really know what the business applications are. Further, this narrow definition of "it can write words, create images and draft some documents" misses the opportunities in automation and workflow (reducing or eliminating those repetitive, low-value, predictable tasks), orchestration (ensuring that processes flow without bottlenecks, no visibility or poor prioritisation) and insights (support for understanding - and predicting the needs of - your prospects, customers, markets, competitors, products/services and staff). For this stage of maturity, we demystify AI, explain what is useful and why and present numerous success stories that help to inspire people that AI is relevant to all businesses.
- "Where do we start with AI?". Gaining the benefits of AI will inevitably require some investment and planning. But where to start? It requires identifying and prioritising opportunities, closing gaps in capabilities, skills and available data and creating a plan that leads from "quick wins" to a business-wide transformation, along with bringing everyone along for the journey. This can be daunting and subject to "we don't know what we don't know" and so support is often needed in identifying, planning, prioritising and "winning the hearts and minds" that are cricial to accelerating benefits and transitioning to being an AI-enabled enterprise.
- "We've tried AI but we don't really see the business benefits". After the initial excitement and how blown away we all were with how clever AI is, many have been left asking, "But is it useful?". Sure, you can get drafts or summaries or documents, you can generate the bare bones of a presentation, you can reword things to make them more appealing to the target audience but the one comment that really stuck with us was when a client said, "For the things that I'm rubbish at doing, AI makes me slightly less rubbish..." And this tale of disappointment is becoming ever more common. One approach is to create an agreed roadmap, as per point 2 above, that focusses of "what we should do" rather than "what we could do". Our further solution is to offer business-focussed, AI-enabled solutions that create value rather than let people access AI capabilities and hope they find some application. Our products create measurable value from day one and cover crucial areas such as customer engagement, innovation, workflow automation and orchestration, and insights into people which can then grow and evolve as your business does. We also offer education, change management and other support to ensure that your business fully benefits from the new world of AI.
Sounds interesting? We've always happy to talk through your ambitions (and challenges) and get you started in the applied (business) world of actificial intelligence
