“How does the technology available today change my organisation over the next four quarters?”
It’s that time of year when these kinds of questions are front and centre. For many organisations, planning for the next financial year is beginning, while others are reviewing the investments already underway.
Both are times when you’re looking at your technology horizon and deciding where to invest. From the S&P 500 to the S&P/ASX 200 and beyond, a lot of conversations right now are about which AI use cases are worth investing in.
Common use cases put forward include summarising documents, assisting with customer responses and helping staff find information. They’re common because they are often inspired by vendor demos.
My take is that, while each is useful in its own right, they tend to solve a very specific problem, which can limit their potential return. Some of the larger opportunities emerge when you zoom out to the organisational level and look for workflows that span multiple departments, teams and systems.
Why look at workflows that span your organisation?
My favourite part of any organisation is the revenue-generating side. Here’s an example from there.
Imagine a sales team with a quote cycle time of several days. Its current workflow requires a team member to interpret a customer’s enquiry, review their account terms, confirm the relevant pricing and then check availability with operations. That last step takes time because the information sits across multiple systems and teams.
Now think about the potential return from an AI-enabled workflow that reads the customer’s enquiry, retrieves the relevant account and product information, checks it against pricing and availability rules, and prepares a quote for final review. As a guardrail, if it can’t complete a step or the request falls outside agreed rules, it flags it for an account manager’s attention.
The value could show up in quote cycle time, conversion rates or the number of opportunities each account manager can handle. Whether it produces a worthwhile return will depend on the implementation cost and the size of those improvements.
Expecting pushback from your teams
Resistance to change is nothing new, and an idea can be dismissed quickly. You may hear plenty of reasons why something of this scale isn’t possible – perhaps a lack of usable data, difficult system integration or just inertia.
Those are important details to work through, but don’t lose sight of the larger opportunity at this stage.
How to move forward
The first step is to understand where the cross-organisational opportunities lie. Narrow them down to the ones with the strongest potential to change a meaningful business measure. Then examine what would need to change to make each one workable.
Some constraints can be addressed. Others may rule out a particular approach.
That gives you a basis for estimating the costs, benefits and timeframe, and deciding whether the use case is worth pursuing.
In summary:
- Understanding the technology helps you see possibilities you might otherwise miss.
- Understanding the business consequence helps you decide which possibilities deserve further work.