Accelerated Innovation

Identifying and Cataloging GenAI Use Cases

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Identifying and Cataloging GenAI Use Cases

Description

Identifying and cataloging GenAI use cases provides a structured approach to discovering, evaluating, and aligning GenAI opportunities with business goals. This foundational activity enables organizations to capture high-value ideas, eliminate duplication, and focus resources where they will have the greatest impact.

Why it's Important

As GenAI continues to evolve rapidly, many teams experiment in silos-leading to redundancy, risk, and missed opportunities. Without a unified view of in-flight and potential use cases, organizations struggle to prioritize efforts, align stakeholders, or scale what works. A centralized use case catalog creates visibility across the business, fosters collaboration, and drives momentum. It also ensures that teams learn from one another’s successes and avoid repeating known pitfalls. Done right, this capability becomes a critical enabler of strategic alignment, efficiency, and acceleration across the GenAI journey.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Fragmented discovery processes: Teams often explore GenAI opportunities independently, making it difficult to surface and align high-value ideas.
  • Unclear ownership and accountability: Without defined roles, use case tracking and follow-through can stall or get lost.
  • Inconsistent criteria for evaluation: Varying standards make it hard to compare, prioritize, or rationalize GenAI initiatives.
  • Lack of centralized visibility: Opportunities and lessons learned are frequently siloed, limiting the organization’s ability to scale what’s working.
  • Difficulty keeping catalogs current: Use cases evolve quickly, and static documentation becomes outdated almost immediately.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires disciplined governance, collaboration across teams, and tools that can evolve alongside GenAI innovation.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the GenAI Center of Enablement (CoE) Best Practices workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Defining the vision and mission of a GenAI CoE.
  • Establishing governance and ownership structures.
  • Cataloging core services and support functions.
  • Communicating value and success metrics.
  • Planning the evolution and scaling of the CoE.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State.
  • Create an actionable enablement plan.
  • Define target timeline and measures of success.
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Launch a centralized GenAI use case tracker: Create a shared workspace to document ideas and in-flight initiatives.
  • Identify duplicate efforts across teams: Surface redundancies to focus investment on unique, high-impact solutions.
  • Highlight 3-5 top-priority use cases: Select early wins based on feasibility, impact, and strategic alignment.
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • GenAI Use Case Discovery & Prioritization Best Practices.
  • GenAI R&D Acceleration & Applied Innovation Best Practices.
  • GenAI R&D Acceleration & Applied Innovation Best Practices.
  • Enterprise GenAI Architecture & Tooling Best Practices.
  • GenAI Development Best Practices & Support.
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Evaluate your current cataloging and intake processes for consistency, clarity, and usability.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Establish policies for how use cases are submitted, reviewed, approved, and maintained.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Ensure metadata such as owner, stage, expected impact, and outcomes are captured and updated consistently.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Roll out the catalog to priority domains first-starting with teams most active in GenAI experimentation.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Provide onboarding, templates, and tooling to make the catalog easy to use and maintain.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Communicate the value and expectations around catalog use clearly and consistently across the business.
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases
  • Standardize Use Case Intake and Review Processes: Define and document consistent steps for submitting, reviewing, and advancing use cases.
  • Publish Templates and Examples: Provide starter kits with sample use cases, prioritization frameworks, and business case formats.
  • Embed Cataloging in Team Routines: Integrate use case updates into sprint planning, release reviews, or quarterly planning.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers
  • Launch Organization-Wide Use Case Drives: Encourage all departments to contribute new GenAI opportunities with leadership sponsorship.
  • Provide Self-Service Access to the Catalog: Make the use case library easy to browse and filter so teams can quickly find and reuse ideas.
  • Incentivize Use Case Sharing and Collaboration: Recognize contributors and highlight high-impact or cross-functional efforts.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum
  • Share Featured Use Cases Monthly: Spotlight examples that are particularly innovative, high-impact, or well-executed.
  • Publish Metrics That Show Catalog Growth: Track and report the number of use cases captured, progressed, and scaled.
  • Highlight Business Value Delivered: Reinforce the importance of cataloging by linking use cases to real outcomes.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine
  • Integrate Use Case Catalog with Development Tools: Link catalog entries directly to sprint boards, backlogs, or solution roadmaps.
  • Include Use Case Tracking in OKRs and Dashboards: Ensure business units are measured on contribution to and usage of the catalog.
  • Refresh Use Cases as Business Priorities Shift: Establish review cycles so catalog entries remain relevant and actionable.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort
  • Automate Metadata Population: Use GenAI to draft or fill in metadata fields like descriptions, impact estimates, or owner roles.
  • Tag and Cluster Similar Use Cases Automatically: Apply AI to detect patterns, surface duplicates, and recommend consolidation.
  • Generate Reports from the Catalog: Build dashboards and summaries that showcase trends, gaps, and success stories.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases
  • Update Prioritization Criteria Based on Outcomes: Refine how opportunities are scored using historical performance and business impact.
  • Expand Catalog to Include Risks and Learnings: Capture what didn’t work and why to improve future decisions.
  • Benchmark Against Industry and Ecosystem: Compare internal activity with external trends to stay competitive and future-ready.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Overloading the catalog with low-value entries: Too many vague or speculative ideas can make the catalog harder to navigate and maintain.
  • Skipping alignment with business priorities: Capturing ideas without linking them to strategic goals leads to wasted effort.
  • Failing to maintain and update records: Stale or incomplete entries erode trust in the catalog and reduce its utility.
  • Allowing inconsistent formats and metadata: Lack of standardization limits the ability to compare and prioritize use cases effectively.
  • Treating the catalog as a reporting tool only: When not embedded in workflows, the catalog becomes passive instead of enabling real outcomes.

Targeted Benefits

While Identifying and Cataloging GenAI Use Cases can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Improved alignment between GenAI efforts and strategic goals: Use case visibility supports smarter prioritization and resource allocation.
  • Faster time to value through reuse and coordination: Teams can avoid reinventing the wheel and build on proven ideas.
  • Higher quality project intake and decision-making: Standardized formats and review criteria improve the rigor of evaluations.
  • Greater cross-functional collaboration: A shared catalog promotes transparency and cooperation across business units.
  • Scalable innovation pipeline: A well-maintained catalog supports the continuous discovery and delivery of high-impact GenAI opportunities.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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