The dos and don’ts of Gen AI

Many companies try to use Gen AI as a hammer, looking for nails to hit – but if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you’re building the wrong solution. Here’s how to use it – and what not to do.

1. Achieving sale

Organizations are finding it hard to use AI to achieve scale. Reasons include:

Not doing your homework. Do you know where you want to go and how you’re going to get there? Do you have the capacity to scale this idea? Start with a clear objective in mind, rather than just asking, “So, what can we do with this Gen AI?”
Treating scale as a one-dimensional problem. What does it mean for the whole business? What does it mean for the users of this product or service, internally and externally?

2. Education and communication

Another recurrent problem is a lack of education and communication. Everyone in the organization needs to understand what AI is and what it means for them:

Ensure everyone knows the difference between past and future. This applies to business operations and processes.
Communicate the benefits of change to people. If you have a new product or service with the potential to help people but don’t show them how, they won’t adopt the innovation and your efforts will be wasted.

3. Supply chain as a competitive tool

Having predictability in the supply-chain process is extremely valuable and a potential source of competitive advantage. You need to:

Build maximum predictability into your supply chain
Re-envisage your supply chain as a competitive tool.

4. AI at the core of business

The way to use AI successfully is to place it at the core of operations (or at the core of products and services). You need to think end-to-end:

Ask simple questions about processes. These include issues such as: “If we hadn’t known how to do this before, how would we do it now?”
Scale experimentation and proof-of-concepts across the organization. Ensure that people sitting close to a business problem can understand it, so the technical people will know how to experiment when looking for solutions.

Key learning

Always retain a product mindset when you’re deploying AI – you’re building products that you’re selling either to your employees or to the outside world. Keep the following issues front of mind:

How are you going to sell it, internally and externally?
What’s the go-to-market plan on top of building the core product?

Öykü Işık

Professor of Digital Strategy and Cybersecurity at IMD

Öykü Işık is Professor of Digital Strategy and Cybersecurity at IMD, where she leads the Cybersecurity Risk and Strategy program and co-directs the Generative AI for Business Sprint. She is an expert on digital resilience and the ways in which disruptive technologies challenge our society and organizations. Named on the Thinkers50 Radar 2022 list of up-and-coming global thought leaders, she helps businesses to tackle cybersecurity, data privacy, and digital ethics challenges, and enables CEOs and other executives to understand these issues.