Mike Mason, Chief AI Officer, Thoughtworks, says the skills, knowledge pool and strategy needed around AI are rapidly coming into sharp focus.
Increasingly mature AI tools and models are opening the door to new or previously unthought-of ways of working, interaction and value creation and that applies to any business.
AI platforms and LLMs are both proliferating and progressing exponentially.
Thousands of new initiatives are focused on the practical application of AI to business processes, product development and customer engagement.
And we’re already seeing new roles like Global Head of Generative AI and organisations creating their own AI chatbots to supercharge employee upskilling.
With all this, the skills, knowledge pool and strategy needed around AI are rapidly coming into sharp focus.
Most businesses are understandably unsure of how to focus their AI plans, how ambitious they should be or where best to start.
A Chief AI Officer’s (CAIO) role is to help businesses navigate this. But practically, what does that look like?
Where to focus?
It can be helpful to break this down and think about the fundamental dimensions where AI impacts the way everyday business works internally. We can think about:
- What kinds of tasks are AI systems best able to help with today, which have drawbacks or pitfalls and what capabilities are likely in the future
- What are we doing to help enable, educate and support all of our teams on their journey to gain AI skills and experience?
- How can we apply AI to augment our internal business processes and operations, whether routine everyday tasks, customer interaction or strategic product development?
Education, engagement and the people factor
Organisations shouldn’t feel they have to have a dedicated AI department, but rather engage employees across every function to charge up AI in their everyday role. Every employee should feel empowered to improve their AI literacy, regardless of which department they sit in. AI is not just the preserve of the dev team, or the tech folk – far from it.
Companies need to do much better than simply crossing their fingers that employees won’t paste confidential information into ChatGPT. Instead, it can be more beneficial to provide licensed, approved AI tools with guidance on how to use them and with what data sources. Employees will feel more empowered and confident to use GenAI, and organisational safety will still be intact.
With AI becoming more advanced and an increasingly visible part of the software employees use to deliver their everyday tasks, confusion and wariness are understandable.
As CAIO it’s always in front of my mind that it is the workforce as a whole that’s using these tools and technologies. That puts a premium on listening, communicating, training and effective management to make the most of any AI investment – but also to navigate change, and drive acceptance and engagement.
Equally, as CAIO sometimes I need to deliver clear steers and decisions. There have been situations where, at the end of the day, I just needed to clearly set direction and people take that as enough reason to cut through red tape and get to an outcome. Especially with AI, people value and are looking for permission to engage and for leadership.
Augmenting, not replacing business processes and interaction
AI is already having a major impact on some processes integral to being a business. Some of the opportunities here include smooth and accelerated human-computer interactions with natural language processing (NLP) opening up new ways for people to communicate with machines, including through everyday conversations. Product development, especially for digital products, can be massively accelerated, enabling enterprises to build and bring offerings to market faster.
Even on a simple level, AI can help end the ‘terror of the blank page’ – something I’m sure we’ve all experienced.
Whatever the task, coming up with initial ideas and making a start from essentially nothing is often the toughest part. AI can eliminate that paralysis by acting as a sounding board and virtual brainstorm partner, whether you’re an exec or a creative – especially key if you work remotely.
Tools like GPT4All, let me run LLMs locally on my workstation and its GPU. Those queries remain fully private and don’t go to the cloud.
Right now, I think it’s important to focus minds on automating tasks, not entire jobs or end-to-end processes.
The need for human involvement to guide and evaluate AI output makes the wholesale outsourcing of roles to AI systems far less likely than many think.
That said, there are some tasks that AI can automate, and many where it can augment human input, making work more consistent and efficient.
Any task that requires access to and analysis of a vast body of knowledge – such as a large number of research papers, or databases of medical or financial information – can be seen as a promising candidate for LLM assistance.
And across all of this, it’s critical to employ tools like GenAI with a common, agreed idea of what ‘good’ looks like for the outcome you’re trying to achieve.
Where are we sailing next?
AI is reshaping businesses fundamentally. An AI leader can help navigate transformation across your business as well as support and enable immediate tactical capabilities and value.
In all of this, it’s worth remembering that the inherent point and value of AI is that it allows new things to be done, in new ways, for the first time – it isn’t just ‘business as usual with AI applied’. That requires as much a focus on people and change as technology itself. It also requires open, collaborative leaders who can work across the board to help grasp the right opportunities, deliver small successes – and be open to learning about mistakes and pitfalls along the way.
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