AI belongs in your business strategy
In our industry, nobody’s doing anything with AI yet.
We already use ChatGPT; we don’t need more AI.
Investing in AI is too expensive for us right now.
There are many excuses why it might not seem like the right time for you to seriously consider AI. Let’s be honest: There’s really no room for nice-to-have digitalization in 2024.
You should only invest in AI if it significantly reduces your process costs and makes your workflows more efficient.
If AI isn’t a top priority in your company, you probably don’t see the necessity yet. In this article, I will explain why you might need to reconsider your stance on the issue, and why delaying further could be a costly mistake.
But let’s start from the beginning...
The Digital Sleepwalk
Technology is always a relatively expensive investment. With nearly all aspects of digital transformation, it’s observed that many companies initially adopt a passive, observational approach. They wait and see how things develop. Eventually, most don’t pursue the topic seriously and, by the time the technology has become mainstream internationally, they finally start a project.
This has been the case with many technological trends. Simple examples include making a company’s website mobile-friendly or investing in infrastructure for mobile working - the latter accelerated only by the COVID-19 crisis.
The question now is whether we can afford the same hesitation with AI.
The Potential and the Learning Curve
Generative AI allows us, for the first time, to automate cognitive steps that until recently were considered non-automatable.
We can now say with high certainty that AI is here to stay and will increasingly automate more and more processes.
How much of your processes can be automated depends greatly on the specifics of your business and your workflows. Based on our experience, automating around 30% to even 60% of processes and thus significantly reducing process costs and throughput time is quite realistic. One study1 suggests an efficiency gain of about 40% for employees.
The fact is: AI is the biggest technological lever for significant cost reduction.
The problem: Introducing AI comes with a steep learning curve!
It takes time to figure out how to use AI to achieve maximum efficiency or customer benefits. Not only are there various implementation options - integrating AI into daily business is a new situation that employees need to adjust to. Even if you want to create new customer value with AI, you first need to identify where AI can bring the greatest benefits to your customers.
Procrastinate, and You Lose
Once you’ve gained these experiences, you’ll quickly benefit from the advantages and gain significant competitive edges in the market.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself:
- When will you invest the necessary time if not now?
- How do you know if your competitors or industry aren’t already exploring these things?
You should see it this way: Now, while AI adoption is still relatively relaxed, you have time to experiment and gather your learnings. Once there’s industry pressure because others are advancing, you’ll have to invest under much more stress. Typically, investments made under pressure aren’t the cheapest.
Fast forward a few years in your mind and imagine your competitors
are 30 or even 50 percent faster in key processes, like fulfillment or
new customer acquisition. What would you do?
Naturally, you would rush to start innovation projects.
You wouldn’t have time to evaluate the appropriate measures.
You wouldn’t have time to assess the processes and their potential.
You wouldn’t have time to choose a good consultant.
You wouldn’t have time to gradually improve the innovations with your employees.
In this setup, costly mistakes and mediocre results are almost guaranteed.
We’re already doing ChatGPT...!
If you use ChatGPT like most companies, that’s just scratching the surface of what you could achieve. Just check for yourself:
The true potential of generative AI unfolds when the AI
- knows specific information about your company - e.g., about customers and projects
- understands your professional jargon, abbreviations, and other insider knowledge
- is integrated into your processes, receiving incoming documents and emails, seeing new transactions in your IT applications, or even creating them.
And we haven’t even talked about the more complex levers like AI behavior adaptation based on retraining.
If your company doesn’t at least meet the above points, you can’t really assess how much value AI brings to you.
Conclusion
What you should take away from this article:
- Introducing AI is a must.
- Introducing AI takes time.
- Introducing AI only makes sense if you fully leverage your potential and not just "do AI somehow."
And ultimately, especially: AI is and can be more than you might think. AI is a complex subject that changes daily and continuously reinvents itself. Therefore, let a mentor guide you in developing and implementing your AI strategy.
Don’t hesitate any longer and book your free strategy session with our AI experts to get direct and non-binding personalized advice and tips for your situation!
