In a recent Microsoft blog, a new study with over 4,000 business leaders was conducted to try and grapple with the question of how people are using AI today effectively. Engineers and leaders around the world are attempting to create scalable and replicable success paths for integrating AI into their workflow. AI is the single largest economic driver for businesses today, but its value is both hard to grasp and even harder to implement.
But there is light at the end of the AI exploration tunnel. From industry wide trends to individual project success, there are some actionable and trodden paths that are reportedly seeing 3x returns. According to the survey, only 22% of surveyed business are considered “Frontier firms” which are the businesses “realizing measurable impact and moving with speed. What are the key distinctions between realizing success with AI in disparate industries and wasting money. Let’s dive into 3 guiding principles of how to think about AI integration into business with the ABCs.
A: Across the Business
When AI first hit the mainstream, chat bots like ChatGPT were the most flashy and popular forms of AI. Businesses rushed to put that little chat message icon on the bottom of their sites so they could say they have an “AI-powered” solution. However, frontier firms are using AI in over seven different business functions across departments on average. This means not just having a consumer-facing chat bot but utilizing agentic workflows across the organization to help empower each business function with faster decision making, better data insights, and more cost-effective workers.
Agentic Agents allow a worker to automate more of their workflow so they can focus on the important and high-business impact work. The IDC estimates the number of companies using agentic AI tripling in the next two years because of the success of the early adopters of agentic AI across their workflows.
B: Building a Skilled Team
Over 71% of the polled business leaders have AI in their budget or plan to in the next year. Each industry leader is taking a different approach in how that budget is created but that percentage signals that AI is becoming a core piece of their strategic plan moving forward. However, just throwing money at AI is not going to enable your teams to effectively collaborate and adopt AI. Many people complain about the “AI slop” that can creep into work when people are blindly using AI and causing more headaches down the road for their coworkers. AI Training and intentional use of AI are some ways to prevent this frustration, but the key piece is helping your team to see where they can insert themselves as “humans in the loop” and what pieces are okay to fully delegate to AI. By outlining practices and guardrails around AI usage, you can better enable your teams to succeed with AI.
C: Custom Solutions that are Domain and Industry Specific
The biggest differentiator between frontier firms and those that are at risk of falling behind is the use of custom AI solutions. By using custom solutions, you can better embed the solution into the core business workflows that already exist and how your business has been running to provide a more frictionless and more accurate AI companion for your teams. AI tools are only as powerful as the data you give them. By enabling them with domain specific knowledge and training your AI solutions to best align with your business needs, you can seamlessly automate more parts of the business and allow your teams to think strategically in where the AI agents can best provide value.
Understanding where custom solutions should fit into your process is a difficult task but doing the work to find out where the gaps are in your business will reveal where you can create AI enabled workflows. AI solution architecting also takes a mindset shift from traditional IT solutions. AI allows architects to approach new kinds of problems with brand new tools in their tool kit.
Check out some examples of our teams implementing custom AI solutions to empower businesses:
Accelerating Accessibility: AI-Powered PowerPoint Remediation for Career and Technical Education
Enhancing Career and Technical Education with AI-Powered Alignment
Transforming Risk Management in the Insurance Industry with Predictive Analytics
The Importance of the ABCs in Becoming a Frontier Firm
AI is revolutionizing how businesses, departments, and people interact on a daily basis. To ensure that the usage of AI is both effective and transformative, businesses need to move from a “bolt on” mindset to an AI integrated organization. Outlining and sticking to some guiding principles like those above can help keep your team aligned to the overall goal and eliminate the wasted time churning through AI slop or repetitive manual tasks. The upfront work of understanding how your business can best use AI and what that looks like for your team is worth it so you can avoid the AI waste and frustration that can happen when the team lacks the strategic vision required to best use AI.
Do you want to become a “Frontier Firm” and better use AI?
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