Implementing AI: The unexpected destination of the AI journey

We’re at the end of 2020, and AI has been a hot topic for quite some time. By now, we’ve all heard the success stories about frontrunning companies inventing one marvelous way to apply AI after another, or companies that claim to put AI first or be truly ‘AI-driven’. We’ve also reached beyond the hype, as we now see AI being more commonly adopted by organizations. Organizations are no longer claiming to be first or even second in their industry, rather they’re taking on this transformation as though it’s a natural next step.

This is when it truly becomes interesting. However, the few extreme cases like the Netflix, Spotify and Amazons of the world are not enough. Not only because it’s hard to learn from extreme cases, but when AI becomes common, we can identify best practice by looking at a broader scope of organizations. What are the most common challenges? What are the most crucial and successful strategies to overcome them? And what do AI-driven organizations really look like in the end?

These are the insights that we at Industry Lab wanted to capture, learn from, and share. So, we reached out to over 2,500 white collar decision makers in US, UK, Germany, India and China who had all adopted AI into their own organizations. We asked for answers to some of our questions, which has resulted in our report, Adopting AI in Organizations.

Talking to the leaders and beginners of AI

Interestingly, what we captured by reaching out on a broader scale is a range of organizations that have reached different levels of AI-maturity. We divided them into three groups; AI-leaders, AI-followers, and AI-beginners, where the AI-leaders have AI and advanced analytics fully implemented in their organization in comparison to the AI-beginners, who are just embarking on this journey.

Now, you may identify your own organization in one of these groups. But no matter where you are on the journey to becoming AI-driven, you’re likely to experience challenges. In fact, the journey to becoming AI-driven is filled with potholes that can sink your progress.

In total, 99 percent of all the decision makers in our study had faced challenges with implementing AI technology. And it seems that the longer you’re at it, the harder it gets. For instance, among those that started their initiatives 4-5 years ago, 75 percent or more of their initiatives had encountered problems. Even the AI-leaders, who had more initiatives than the other two groups, which started 4-5 years ago, stated that almost 60 percent of their initiatives had faced challenges.

The crucial follow up question is: What kind of challenges? Do you think it’s about the technology? Well, perhaps you should prepare for a minor surprise. It’s not the technology that was the main issue. Rather, 91 percent of our respondents said that they had encountered challenges in all the three categories we tested; technology, organization, and people and culture. And out of these categories, it becomes clear that the most troublesome area was in fact people and culture. It seems that many organizations have problems getting their people onboard when implementing AI and advanced analytics. For instance, many respondents mentioned a resistance to adopting new ways of working amongst employees, or that there was a fear amongst employees of losing their jobs.

Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that the most critical strategies to overcome challenges are related to the same area of people and culture. All in all, it’s clear that the journey towards becoming AI-driven is very much a cultural one!

An investment for long term change

But where does this journey lead? I bet that for most companies that embark on an organizational transformation, most will envision a move from one stable situation, through a period of controlled chaos (hopefully), into a new stable situation. But this doesn’t seem to be the case when we look at how these AI-adopting organizations perceive the future!

To understand what it will be like to be fully AI-driven, we focused our efforts on the AI-leaders, as they’re the ones who have reached the furthest and may have a clearer view of where they’re heading. This group have already implemented AI in their organization, or will have done so within the year of 2020. You would expect then, that they’d feel that they’re done with the job, having fully implemented and delivered AI into the organization. In fact, they’re far from being done. Rather the opposite ­– they’re expecting to invest even more in AI over the coming 18 months, and investing on a much bigger scale than before. The plans to invest were noticeably lower within the other two groups.

Based on this, it’s fair to expect that AI leaders will further outrun the other organizations in the future. Perhaps it’s because they have a different idea of the emerging new, stable situation. The future that AI-leaders are foreseeing, is NOT one of stability and being “done” with implementation. Instead, the majority of AI-leaders are picturing a future where the focus has shifted away from products and services to producing AI applications. Furthermore, almost 70 percent of AI-leaders foresee a constant flow of new AI and advanced analytics applications and a constant change of work processes.

Imagine a future organization, where there’s a constant flow of applications, and where all new applications have the potential to improve productivity, change work tasks or processes, influence decision making and allow for new problem solving. It looks like the stable situation that we’re aiming for will be a situation of continuous change. An organization where the introduction of AI will never truly be completed. And this is what we must prepare for!

I believe a first good step to prepare for this is to read our full report and discover what you can learn from AI-adopting organizations; what challenges they meet, and what strategies they use to embrace the future. Nevertheless, a gentle warning and disclaimer: reading our report could ruin your good night’s sleep, as it may cause a heavy pondering of your organization’s future operations…

Read the report Adopting AI in Organizations.
Read the presentation

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Read Rebecka’s previous blog posts AI and the future of work: becoming cyborgs!

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