Martin Owen is CEO of Quark Software and is an expert in data and content management technologies for digital transformation.
As we near the end of the first half of 2024, the talk of AI continues to be everywhere with no signs of slowing down. AI is no longer hype; it’s a focal point being discussed within every business across every industry. Organizations know AI can power organizational growth and are knee-deep in thinking about what AI technologies to deploy, when and how to use them across their business.
Most talk sessions at industry events this year are about AI—particularly generative AI—with pundits predicting how it will fuel business growth and, importantly, how it will impact your people. With the opportunity also comes the FUD factor, yet business leaders fundamentally all agree that if they aren’t using AI as part of their value proposition, they’ll get overlooked by customers, prospects and the markets they play.
Investing in AI is investing in the future of the business. With content today having a direct impact on business growth, organizations are evaluating the opportunity generative and other forms of AI present in supporting content strategies. Yet with each business having unique objectives and strategies for growth, many are challenged with understanding how AI can work for their business and deliver more value to not only their customers but also to their employees.
Here are a few crucial business-level tips you should consider discussing even considering what AI-powered technologies are worth investing in.
Know how you want AI to really work for your organization.
It’s becoming fairly known that organizations investing in AI are doing so to automate mundane tasks to free up people to add more strategic value to the business. However, for organizations operating in highly regulated industries where they must deliver regulated and compliance-controlled content on a regular basis, workflow automation may not be the top priority AI use case. Rather, they seek to deploy AI to help ensure the content published meets ever-changing compliance policies. View AI through the lens of your business priorities and identify what use cases can benefit now from AI.
Base AI decisions on business goals and not technology features.
Every line of business lead across your organization must evaluate how you will benefit from AI. Identify what success looks like for your business three, five or even 10 years from now. Then, identify and prioritize the strategies, business processes and applications that will help you meet these incremental milestones.
It is only then you will have clarity on what operational use cases will require AI investments and when—and how realistic the timeline is to deploy them and experience the attributed ROI. For example, does AI simply help in generative content creation, summarization and translation? Or does it play a more technical and semantic role in natural language search to discover and convert unstructured content, such as flat PDFs, into modular, reusable components? The answer lies not in the capability but in the commercial reason why.
Understand how AI will affect your people.
Change is hard for most people, requiring them to break out of their comfort zone and adapt to something new and unfamiliar. With most organizations arguably evaluating how and when to deploy AI, it’s crucial to keep your people on top of your mind and consider how AI will impact your workforce.
With change comes opportunity. Bring your people into the AI planning process early by listening and learning how they think the technology will affect them. Implement tactics that raise employee awareness of the business goals AI will support and opportunistic areas of the business for AI implementation.
Involving employees in discussions around AI initiatives early can lead to increased acceptance and adoption, which translates to your company’s competitive differentiation and long-term success. And as all similar groundbreaking global technologies in the past have shown, AI won’t replace your people; rather, it will support their ability to provide even more value to your company.
Conclusion
An organization’s content is the fuel that powers its AI systems, enabling them to learn, understand and generate insights. Each organization has unique business goals, so measuring the ROI of your AI investment is unique to the business, too.
But before you dive into purchasing AI technologies, take a step back and carefully define what your business priorities for AI entail. This could include automating repetitive tasks, supporting new offerings for your business or streamlining business processes. Only then will your organization be able to maximize the benefits of this technology. Look beyond the surface benefits of AI and remember that AI has to have depth and substance in order for it to have a successful, valuable impact on your business, your people and your customers.
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