“The only way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker
Leaders around the world are wrestling with similar questions in 2024 when it comes to Generative AI, including:
- What role should GenAI play across my business?
- Where should we start?
- What do we have to do really well to realize the benefits of GenAI?
While there’s no ‘silver bullet’ for success with GenAI, there is a clear set of emerging ‘Keys to Winning’ to maximize your impact and accelerate your journey.
#1: A Compelling ‘True North’
Success with GenAI starts with understanding its core capabilities, explicitly committing to the journey, and establishing a compelling ‘True North’ for your journey. GenAI best practices are rapidly evolving, and there will undoubtedly be a number of ‘twists and turns’ along the way. There are also a wide range of technical, capability and governance challenges you’ll need to solve for sustained success with GenAI. Make sure you’ve defined a clear and compelling Vision, Strategy & Roadmap that can serve as a ‘North Star’ for your teams as they navigate the fastest evolving innovation the world has ever seen.
#2: Ensuring You Have the Talent to ‘Win’ with GenAI
GenAI is driving the need for new skills and enterprise capabilities at a scale we’ve not seen since the transition to internet-based commerce. It can be difficult to ‘rewind the clock’ 20 years, but at the time, we weren’t sure what commercial internet-based solutions should look like, how to secure them, how to scale them, how to monitor them, how to secure them – the list goes on… The same now holds true for GenAI solutions, but with additional levels of complexity added in for good measure. This will likely be the ‘heaviest lift’ in terms of successfully adopting GenAI, and will be a large factor in your long-term success with these new capabilities.
#3: Building & Sustaining Momentum
GenAI adoption can be challenging and embedding new capabilities and solutions into an organization’s core ways of working requires focus and commitment. Delivering a set of high-visibility ‘Quick Wins’ early in the journey can build significant momentum for your adoption efforts and bring these new capabilities to life for your team members. Once you’ve generated momentum, it’s critical to sustain and feed it. Ensuring you deliver high-impact GenAI solutions every quarter, if not monthly, is crucial for sustaining momentum across your GenAI efforts.
#4: Accelerated Innovation & Delivery
In the realm of GenAI, innovation and speed are intertwined. You’ll need to focus on accelerating your innovation cycles to quickly turn AI-driven ideas into valuable products and services. This requires a streamlined framework for rapid experimentation, development, and deployment, ensuring that businesses can swiftly adapt to new AI advancements and market shifts.
#5: Strategic and Tactical Adaptability
Finally, strategic and tactical adaptability is essential. Your GenAI journey will be iterative, not linear, with plenty of aha moments along the way. Given this reality, you’ll need to be able to pivot strategies and tactics in response to emerging trends, technological breakthroughs, and changing market conditions. This adaptability empowers organizations to not only withstand disruptions but to leverage them as opportunities for growth and innovation.
What We’re Seeing in Practice
- Equal parts interest and confusion: Many leaders are excited about GenAI’s potential to accelerate their business’ performance; Others are trying to separate the actual value from the ‘hype’. The predominant reaction, though, is a mix of both, with most leaders still working to develop a clear perspective on their GenAI priorities.
- Uncertainty about where to start: This is almost universal… With commercial offerings, the promise of custom GenAI solutions, and concerns about security and compliance, most organizations are wrestling with where to start their efforts and how quickly they need to move.
- ChatGPT ≠ GenAI: For many, Generative AI is synonymous with ChatGPT. In reality, the underlying capabilities that ChatGPT represents have far broader strategic implications. It’s critical that leaders look beyond the relatively narrow use cases solved by ChatGPT and develop a clear vision of how GenAI can be leveraged across their business to solve complex problems in new and innovative ways.
- ‘Sound and Fury, Signifying very Little’: Often we find underneath all of the PowerPoints and townhall communications, very little actual strategy and roadmap clarity. This isn’t to cast shade on anyone but has to be pretty uncomfortable for those leaders leaning on messaging, without an integrated strategy beneath it.
- Fragmented strategies, unlikely to drive success: The last trend we’ll reference is the lack of integration and coherence across many group’s GenAI strategy. One of the core challenges of success with GenAI is the sheer range of competencies and functions that need to come together for scaled success. Many companies are piloting solutions, some are proactively addressing Secure and Responsible AI needs, but few have an integrated strategy and roadmap that positions them for accelerated success across their GenAI adoption efforts.
This is the introductory blog of an integrated ‘Keys to Winning with GenAI’ series, and touches only superficially on each of the five Keys to Winning. Please click below to explore the ‘deeper dive’ topics.
- Defining a Compelling GenAI ‘True North’ for Your Business
- Ensuring You Have the Talent & Capabilities to Win with GenAI
- Building & Sustaining Momentum for your GenAI Adoption Efforts
- Streamlining GenAI Innovation and Solution Delivery
- Developing a GPS for Your GenAI Journey
To learn more about Accelerated Innovation’s end-to-end GenAI enablement services, or specific topics of interest, schedule a call and get started on our GenAI Journey.
