Accelerated Innovation

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Defining GenAI's Role In Your Business

Description

Understanding GenAI’s role in your business means identifying how it will create value across products, services, and operations. This includes pinpointing the most relevant use cases, determining where GenAI can enhance or disrupt your model, and aligning innovation with business outcomes.

Why it's Important

Without a clear role for GenAI in the business model, organizations risk spreading efforts too thin or pursuing efforts with minimal impact. Defining GenAI’s role focuses innovation, guides investment, and ensures alignment between technical exploration and business value. This clarity also empowers leaders to prioritize high-impact opportunities, eliminate distractions, and adapt faster to emerging market shifts.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Undefined Business Relevance: Many organizations explore GenAI without clearly linking it to specific business outcomes, creating confusion and inertia.
  • Scattered Use Case Efforts: Without a unifying view, teams may pursue disconnected pilots that fail to demonstrate enterprise value.
  • Competing Internal Narratives: Different leaders often have conflicting perspectives on where and how GenAI should be used.
  • Lack of Decision-Making Frameworks: Teams may struggle to evaluate which GenAI opportunities are worth investing in, leading to indecision or misalignment.
  • Rapidly Evolving Expectations: As market and stakeholder expectations shift, it becomes difficult to maintain a stable and shared understanding of GenAI’s role.

Complexity

High: Defining GenAI’s role across the business requires cross-functional alignment, clarity of vision, and disciplined prioritization in a fast-changing landscape.

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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.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Exploring the Keys to Winning with GenAI workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.

Jumpstarting Your Plan

  • Define your accountable leads), their roles, responsibilities, and committed capacity.
  • Deliver your first 90-day quick wins.
  • Configure your Delta 7/28 Plan module.
  • Define your measures of success and insights plan.
  • Build and kick off your change and comms plan.

Targeted Activities

  • Define GenAI’s target role in your business model
  • Deliver your Sponsor Alignment Pack (definitions, assumptions, decision points)
  • Publish your Stakeholder Alignment Map and Decision Rights
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to accelerate your GenAl Vision development efforts.

Jumpstarting Your Plan

  • Define your accountable leads), their roles, responsibilities, and committed capacity.
  • Deliver your first 90-day quick wins.
  • Configure your Delta 7/28 Plan module.
  • Define your measures of success and insights plan.
  • Build and kick off your change and comms plan.

Targeted Activities

  • Define GenAI’s target role in your business model
  • Deliver your Sponsor Alignment Pack (definitions, assumptions, decision points)
  • Publish your Stakeholder Alignment Map and Decision Rights
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Host a Business Model Brainstorming Session: Invite cross-functional leaders to explore where GenAI could disrupt or enhance current business models.
  • Pilot a Use Case Impact Map: Select a high-potential area (e.g., customer support, personalization) and map how GenAI could improve outcomes.
  • Share GenAI-in-Business Case Studies: Curate short stories of how peers or competitors are using GenAI to redefine core elements of their business.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale.
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Validate how clearly GenAI use cases are aligned with business model transformation objectives.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Identify what’s in and out of scope for GenAI initiatives and ensure clear governance policies are in place.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Pinpoint missing data, metrics, or KPIs that will be required to track GenAI’s impact on your business model.
  • 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: Map out which business areas will be prioritized and how each phase will build toward your larger transformation goals.
  • Build Awareness and Finalise Enablers: Equip key teams with GenAI knowledge, tools, and champions to support successful scaling.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Develop a narrative around GenAI’s business value and embed it in regular updates, leadership messaging, and team engagement channels.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases.
  • Document Lessons Learned: Capture how GenAI is shaping your business model and consolidate insights from early initiatives.
  • Develop GenAI Training: Build training sessions that focus on how GenAI can redefine your business model and competitive edge.
  • Form a GenAI Community: Establish forums where business and tech leaders can share GenAI business model innovations.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers.
  • Expand GenAI Applications: Scale efforts that show clear business model enhancement potential, and proactively seek adjacent opportunities.
  • Foster a GenAI Culture: Create storytelling moments around business impact to normalize GenAI as core to your strategy.
  • Eliminate Adoption Barriers: Streamline access to tools, data, and enablement resources for teams reimagining core business activities.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum.
  • Highlight Milestones: Recognize tangible GenAI impact moments that signal transformation of your business model.
  • Share Impact Stories: Tell focused stories about business units achieving measurable outcomes through GenAI.
  • Recognize GenAI Champions: Spotlight leaders who are helping reshape how GenAI drives business value and transformation.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine.
  • Embed in Core Business Processes: Ensure GenAI tools are woven directly into strategic decision-making and operational workflows.
  • Simplify Day-to-Day Interactions: Make GenAI tools so intuitive and relevant that teams use them without thinking twice.
  • Monitor and Refine Usage Patterns: Use internal analytics to continuously improve how and where GenAI creates business value.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort.
  • Automate Model-Driven Business Activities: Apply GenAI to automate research, content generation, and data synthesis within business workflows.
  • Adopt Specialized AI Toolkits: Equip teams with tailored GenAI solutions aligned to specific business functions (e.g., finance, marketing, ops).
  • Expand Intelligent Process Automation: Combine GenAI with broader automation platforms to transform key end-to-end business activities.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases.
  • Monitor Emerging Industry Shifts: Track how peers and competitors are reshaping their business models with GenAI-and adjust fast.
  • Expand into New Business Domains: Test GenAI in high-value areas like pricing, partnerships, or product innovation to push boundaries.
  • Iterate Your Vision and Strategy: Evolve your GenAI narrative and approach to stay ahead of industry norms and stakeholder expectations.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Fuzzy Value Propositions: Pursuing GenAI projects without clearly linking them to business model impact leads to wasted effort.
  • Isolated Innovation Pockets: When GenAI initiatives aren’t tied to enterprise priorities, they stay siloed and lose momentum.
  • Misalignment Across Leadership: Without shared agreement on GenAI’s role in the business, teams struggle to make coordinated progress.
  • Underestimating Enablement Needs: Teams may lack the business context, training, or tools to apply GenAI effectively.
  • Moving Too Fast Without Guardrails: Scaling without clarity on risk, governance, or business implications can backfire.

Targeted Benefits

While defining GenAI’s role in your business model can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Focused Innovation: GenAI efforts align directly to business value, reducing distractions and boosting impact.
  • Smarter Prioritization: Clear business context enables better investment and use case selection.
  • Stronger Stakeholder Alignment: Cross-functional teams can move in sync with a unified GenAI business strategy.
  • Accelerated Adoption: When teams understand “why it matters,” they engage more fully and move faster.
  • Greater Competitive Differentiation: GenAI becomes a lever for evolving your business model ahead of the curve.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

Ask me anything about AI concepts, best practices, Accelerated Innovation solutions, or how to get started.