The AI Organization

Chapter 2. The Technical Transformation: Bringing AI to Every Application

You’ll often hear that technology and business have to come together in an organization in order for it to successfully embrace AI.  You will see this in Chapter 3, as well as strategies to make it happen—but it doesn’t have to start out that way. Just like Kriti’s beginnings at Barclays or Sage, the journey to the AI organization can start with a purely technical approach. This first step—transforming your technical departments—is the focus of this chapter.

At the end of the day, you can consider AI as better software. As long as you continue the journey, starting with the technical aspects will give you a strong foundation to build on and help you quickly differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Starting on the technical side will also help you build the necessary AI muscle to address the broader AI transformation. The scarcity of AI technical talent is one of the most important blockers for AI adoption in the enterprise, but exposing your technical teams to real AI projects will encourage reskilling and talent acquisition. This will need to be associated with a corresponding training initiative (more on this in Chapter 8), and it will allow you to leverage the existing software muscle in your organization.

Understanding Your Application Portfolio

Identifying the list of software candidates to transform is relatively simple. You don’t need to inventory assets that are traditionally not well documented ...