The AI Ladder

Chapter 9. Infuse AI Throughout the Business

You should be thinking about how you’re going to infuse AI throughout your organization from day one. That’s one reason to start with a large number of small projects, rather than a single big one: many small successes will mean much more to stakeholders than one big success, and certainly much more than one big failure. We’re telling you right now, some of your new projects will fail—that’s true in any area, but particularly so when you’re taking on a new technology. If you’re going to take advantage of AI, you need to use it everywhere; you need to push it into every department, every business process, every activity, and make your workflows intelligent. We’ve arrived at the Infuse rung of the AI Ladder (Figure 9-1).

Figure 9-1. The Infuse rung of the AI Ladder

C-suite executives are turning to AI because in order to compete, they need to be able to innovate at speed. Their goals include:

• Predicting and shaping future outcomes

• Humanizing customer experiences

• Empowering people to focus on higher-value work

• Supporting human capital in their efforts to reimagine new business models by infusing intelligence into their workflows

For many organizations, the best strategy to achieve these goals is to start at the top of the AI Ladder. That sounds counterintuitive, but remember we noted earlier that the ladder isn’t perfectly linear; it’s ...