Introduction
Artificial Intelligence is yet another tool that is an overnight success, decades in the making. The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) seems huge since ChatGPT brought AI from what Gartner’s Hype Cycle calls the Trough of Disillusionment to what might be the beginnings of the Slope of Enlightenment. But what do you really need to do with it, if anything? Do you need to build anything strategically core to your customer offerings? Use it as a tool to enhance existing offerings? Or use something more operational; from process management to marketing. One challenge right now is people seem to want to just sprinkle some AI on things to make sure the buzzword is in a product checklist or annual report.
According to Statista’s “AI Trends & Predictions Roadmap to 2025,” AI market value will increase from US$244 billion in 2025 to US$827 billion by 2030. You can find predications of various magnitudes from other sources. But what does it mean? Chances are it means your competitors are deploying AI. Whether it’s for something useful with solid ROI or not is the question. If your competition is deploying things, you’d better at least be doing research.
So where do you start? Too many posts I’m seeing talk about AI Strategy go right to implementation. That’s AI at tactical level. There’s value in that. And it’s possible to think of general capabilities as strategic. But being strategic means starting with your business drivers. Your AI strategy, (just like all the others), should be based on the value you’re trying to create. At the very highest level, as always… there’s basically two goals: Increase Revenue. Or Decrease Costs. Unless you’re actually building and selling the AI tools themselves, chances are the value you’re creating comes from elsewhere. In which case AI is “just” a tool; another means to an end. Being skilled at it may be a strategic capability, but it’s not a business strategy in and of itself.
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