Almost all of us use AI every day now, often without realising.
AI gives us personalised recommendations when we are shopping online (if you shop with ASOS you will recognise its sophisticated recommendations based on your shopping habits), it is assisting people when parking cars and it is filtering selfies through the likes of Snapchat and Instagram.
It is increasingly helping us in our personal lives, but how is it helping us in terms of our day jobs?
AI can collect and analyse data faster than any human. This often scares people into thinking that machines are going to take all our jobs. But AI is not designed to replace us, it is here to work with us and increase the impact of our work. AI is about improving and empowering humans and their skills.
Get creative
AI enables humans to focus our time and effort on more meaningful work, rather than manual, repetitive work – the type of jobs that no one really wants to do. AI enables us to complete tasks that are best done by humans. It frees us to use our creativity and emotional intelligence, enabling us to spend time using our human traits that machines cannot beat us on.
AI is assisting us in our work roles every day, often in small ways that we now take for granted. Our morning email checks are sped up through AI sorting our mailboxes by automatically cleansing spam and unwanted emails from our inbox.
The bigger possibilities of what AI can and is doing for organisations is where it gets really exciting. In healthcare, computers are learning to read radiological images faster (and more accurately in some cases) than medical practitioners, but this does not mean we will not need the medical experts. It simply means they can focus their time on value-add activities such as creating tailored treatment plans for their patients instead. This is a task that is often a timely and expensive process. It is also making banking easier and more secure, helping identify fraud and, ultimately, delivering a better experience for customers.
Where to start?
Microsoft states that organisations that are already on their AI journey are more productive and see 5% greater business outcomes than those who are not. That being said, it can be overwhelming to decide where and how to get started on your AI journey. AI is about seizing the right opportunities, making small changes and keeping human skills in mind. It is not about what AI can do, but what it should do (read more on this topic in our AI for good article).
Here are some quick tips on how to kickstart your organisation’s AI journey.
1. Think about what problems you are trying to fix
Many organisations get caught up in trying to use AI just for the sake of it. Instead start small. Think about how you can practically address recurring business challenges. Ask your stakeholders (employees, leaders, volunteers, services users, customers) for their thoughts on what challenges they are facing or fixing day in day out.
Perhaps you’d like to improve your customer’s online experience or reduce the number of call your call centre receives. You could create a chatbot to help your customers quickly find the answers they are looking for. Or you could use AI to predict trends for advertising so you can create targeted ads per audience and drive more sales.
Incremental’s Data Maturity Assessment is a good starting point for uncovering your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses and where you could make quick improvements through the use of AI and other healthy data practices.
2. Take people on your AI journey
As discussed, a lot of people have concerns when it comes to AI. It is important to show these groups how AI can make their roles easier and more fulfilling – it is not here to take their job.
Make your AI journey a positive and exciting one. Empower your employees with the skills they will need in the future. Companies that offer ongoing staff training also have higher retention rates. 70% of employees state that development and training opportunities influenced their decision to stay at a company.
It is important to take people on your AI journey and not alienate them.
3. Get everyone involved
To avoid alienation get your employees hands-on with the technology. Consider running a team hackathon to up-skill the team.
It is important that you do not implement your AI tools and then just leave them. These tools should continually grow, adapt and improve – and this is ultimately driven by your people and their input. This will in turn enable the tools to deliver much better outcomes for your organisation.
AI will continue to disrupt the world of work as well as our personal lives in new and inventive ways. Incremental Group works with all types of organisations to build AI roadmaps whereby we uncover your business problems and develop projects to solve these issues through the use of AI.
To find out more about how Incremental can help you kickstart your AI journey discover our intelligence services or get in touch.