ChatGPT generated image
One of the biggest mistakes organisations are currently making with AI is starting by talking about and focusing on the technology, with many conversations asking, ‘Which tools should we use?’ How do we use the specific capabilities of specific tools? (Something that Alexis Fink Alexis Fink acknowledges in a Center for Effective Organizations at USC Marshall newsletter).
But deploying AI for strategy transformation requires a very different starting point. It starts with talking about, negotiating and articulating the destination. Understanding where you are trying to go, aka ‘the destination’, must come before tool selection.
Every talent decision, technology decision, and AI investment is made because organisations are attempting to journey towards ‘somewhere’. We may have a desired future state, a strategic ambition, a desire to strengthen competitive positioning, expand into new markets, lower operational costs, or potentially create new capabilities.
And yet many organisations are currently embarking on AI journeys without first defining the destination. Some decision-makers are telling their workforce to go and experiment with the tools and report back. At an individual level, this can indeed generate productivity gains. People may automate tasks, reduce administration steps, compose presentations faster, generate images to accompany text, and be more ‘efficient’.
The organisational challenge, however, arises when this experimentation approach scales before strategic direction has been established. Without a clear destination, a clear ‘somewhere’, AI, much like other technologies, risks taking us further away from where we want to be, with fragmented workflows, inconsistent assumptions, duplication and decision-making drift quietly becoming part of our new ways of working.
This is why AI transformation projects need a map. A map helps us understand:
- Where are we now
- Where are we trying to go
- What pathways and journeys are possible
- Which pathways and journeys may create more risk and
- Which pathways present more opportunities
Without a map, we can be moving, but unaware whether that movement is helping us navigate in the right direction. An organisation can generate a lot of movement (aka activity), yet that movement can drift it further away from its strategic ambitions.
This is particularly important for AI because AI supports and shapes decisions. AI influences what gets prioritised, what gets measured, what gets optimised, which workflows become embedded and accepted ways of working and which assumptions become normalised.
And this connection is not new. We already know that talent, technology, strategy and decision-making enjoy a reciprocal relationship. Technology shapes decisions. Decisions shape technology selection and deployment. Talent availability shapes technology selection and together they shape strategy execution.
The challenge is not in recognising these inherent interconnections. Rather, the contemporary challenge is ensuring that the interactions remain strategically aligned as AI scales and scales at speed.
Before selecting and deploying AI, organisations need clarity around several foundational questions:
- What game are we playing? (Strategy)
- What is the prize? (notion of success)
- What does success actually look like?
- What happens when we get to our ‘somewhere’?
These foundational questions help us to understand (in advance) what AI should prioritise, optimise, and also what aspects of work AI should be excluded from. (Do not assume that AI should be everything and everywhere – it shouldn’t).
And if your organisation does not provide answers to these questions upfront, the AI will still take part in a journey along the map because AI does not wait for strategic clarity before generating activity.
It is important to recognise that a map does not remove uncertainty. But a map helps ensure organisations remain directionally aligned as the conditions and technologies change around them.
That is why strategy matters so much when talking about AI and transformation because pursuing AI transformation without a map is likely to result in strategic drift. The salient strategic challenge is ensuring that the ‘somewhere’ of the transformation journey is a destination intentionally chosen rather than one that (quietly) emerges from other means, including AI.
Sharna Wiblen 