AI Ready Model – Business Development & Innovation

Many of us have already started to ”play” with AI technology and found some useful use cases. Maybe you have asked an AI agent to summarize notes from an online meeting, used an online tool to translate a text to your language or even asked an AI model to create or refine your CV. 

All of these are capabilities that can be very useful for both individuals and organisations (my own corporation operates a website with 4 languages, so there is potential for much time saving if an AI agent can do translations for us). However, as much fun and usefulness there is in these use case, the business value to be gained from them is quite limited. The potential in generation of business value and development is of course much greater than this. 

For your organisation and its AI initiatives to reach its full potential and deliver business value, we believe another basic capability of an industrial model to support AI readiness should contain a function for Business Development & Innovation.

The Business Development & Innovation capability should consist of competence, experience, tooling and methodology for business development related to AI. The function should include persons with experience from business development including or supported by technology. It should further include methodology to calculate business value/business cases for implementation of new technology and modified processes. 

As business development involving tech (especially AI tech) almost always involves organisational change and modified processes, it should also hold expertise and models for change management. Implementing AI technology without also changing the way of work seldom leads to desired effects or results. Also with the implementation of AI to change business processes or ”the way we do things”, there will always be resistence from the organisation and the ones that believe this is not the best way to move forward. 

This resistance needs to be handled with respect and you need to establish a process (see previous blog posts on the AI implementation process) where users, colleagues or other stake holders are convinced that the technology can be trusted and delivers as expected. In one of the customer cases we are involved, the customer investigates the possibility to let an AI engine write software code. To ensure quality and belief in the tooling, human developers are currently reviewing the code before it is committed to the respository. 

This is one way of building trust and belief in a new way of working. The result this far? - The AI engine generates better code than the human developers.

The business development & innovation capability needs to be supported by both IT and business decision makers to have sufficient mandate to achieve real change and to push for required changes. This support can either be through CXO clear and undoubted sponsorship or active participation in the work by decision makers. 

The potential in AI technology, and its ability to fundamentally change how we do things in the future, justifies key person direct involvement. It is also true that as with all change management work, clear and undoubted mandates from management is a pre-requisite for the initiatives ability to reach desired results. We have seen several important change projects fail due to lack of management support, don’t let that happen to your AI initiative. 

Also when it comes to business development related to the use of AI technology you should think big. Don’t just think of how you can translate texts faster (which of course is great, but not revolutionizing) or transcript meeting notes (again...great, but no game-changer), but rather on how AI technology can bring a greater value to your business. The business development & innovation capability shall support your initiatives/projects in the thinking of ”Think Big – Act Small – Scale Fast” to set the mindset right. 

With this mindset it might be possible to identify AI use cases over time that fundamentally change how your business operates (for instance how your industrial robots operates, how you analyze data and make informed business decisions etc) in the future and how to fend off the competition.

With a Business Development & Innovation capability as part of your AI initiative, you ensure that AI investments are put into use to create business value and assist in making your business long term successful.

This is our last blog post in this series to introduce the ”Redpill Linpro AI Ready Model”. AI is a phenomenon that will affect all of us in the future, both in our private lives and at work, as well as with all businesses and organisations. It is not easy to navigate the right way with a technology that is this powerful, but with a thought-through strategy, committed resources and a structured approach to face opportunities and challenges your organisation will be prepared. This is to purpose of the ”AI Ready Model”. 

The model itself will not make you AI ready, but it will assist in establishing the processes and capabilities your organisation requires to be prepared for innovation and efficiency using AI. We hope that you have found the reading useful and that you can make use of our ideas in your AI work. We would be very happy to connect to exchange ideas, experiences and use cases for how AI can be put into use in real life.