Are You Overlooking Key Elements of Your AI Strategy?

When building an AI strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in the technology itself or to focus narrowly on a single business area like customer care. But seasoned CIOs — veterans of multiple digital transformations — know that a truly comprehensive AI strategy must navigate at least three cascading challenges.

First-Order Challenge: Choosing Where to Implement AI

We begin with identifying where any new technology can make a real impact in our organization. The market today is flooded with vendors offering niche, single-point AI solutions. So, where do we start? Choosing the right application of AI within our company is crucial, but it’s just the first step. Picking the right problem to solve is more important than picking the right tool.

Second-Order Challenge: Scaling AI Across the Business

Once we’ve successfully deployed our initial AI solution, a new question shows up: how can we expand our AI capabilities to address multiple challenges? Often, teams begin to independently implement their own solutions, which will lead to a fragmented AI landscape within the company. When that happens, we’ll have to consider whether to leverage our current provider, develop solutions in-house, or introduce new vendors into the mix. Scaling AI is not just a tech challenge, it’s a management challenge that can only be met if you have an enterprise-wide AI and integration architecture strategy.

Third-Order Challenge: Managing Complex AI Ecosystems

As our AI implementations multiply, the complexity of managing them will grow exponentially. This phase involves more stringent risk management, security, scalability, and technology controls. With each new AI project, we’re not just adding another tool, we’re increasing the complexity of our digital ecosystem. Managing risks, enforcing policies, and overseeing the technology lifecycles become critical as our reliance on AI grows.

We can overcome all three challenges

Understanding these three interconnected challenges from the start allows us to make strategic decisions at each stage of AI integration. It’s essential for us to see beyond the initial deployment and consider the full scope of how AI will impact our organization. As we’ve learned with previous digital transformations, we must have a comprehensive enterprise strategy if we want to be successful. AI is no different.