Five principles to secure your AI advantage

In the business world, Gartner recently reported a 270% increase in AI implementation over the last four years. The technology is being hailed as the differentiator between long-term success and falling behind, and at the 2019 World Economic Forum it emerged that China has taken the lead in the AI revolution. It’s clear that AI adoption is no longer a choice – it’s a must and will soon be ubiquitous.

We see a lot of evidence of companies investing in AI initiatives in our work at the Applied Innovation Exchanges: chatbots for consumer-facing functions, machine and deep learning for transforming operations, and the automation of backroom processes. But these are only scratching the surface of what is possible. AI shouldn’t be seen as a bolt-on initiative or isolated project, it needs to be infused into an organization’s business fabric. Eventually, AI will underpin most – if not all – business processes.

Implementing AI correctly, therefore, is instrumental to long-term business planning and sustainable growth. This can be tricky to do. The use cases for AI are numerous, scattered, and often complex. Businesses need to be strategic with how they infuse AI into their organizations – or risk investment without reward. AI implementation also needs to embrace the workforce. There is a lot of fear-mongering about AI, and businesses need to ensure that they are transparent, fair, and ethical in how they implement it.

These big challenges are exactly why Capgemini has launched Perform AI, a portfolio of solutions to help companies compete in an AI-fueled world. We have designed Perform AI with the following five critical success factors in mind. These guiding principles are crucial to infusing AI into your organization in a way that will generate superior, sustainable, and trustworthy business impact.

1. Apply AI at scale: Pursuing AI as just another piece of shiny tech is a worthless strategy. AI implementation needs to go beyond proofs-of-concept and isolated deployments. It needs to be industrialized across the enterprise, scaling the business benefits throughout the organization.
2. Empower your people: A recent publication from the Capgemini Research Institute highlighted a mix of anxiety and ill-informed opinion obscuring the risks and opportunities involved in implementing AI. Organizations need to take a pragmatic approach if they are to move forward. Part of this will be a strong focus on people. Businesses must proactively manage the impact of AI initiatives on augmented workforces and find the best interactions between people and AI.
3. Transform operations and beyond: At its heart, AI is about leveraging vast arrays of data to create insights that are then operationalized and continuously improved. It is, therefore, vital that organizations utilize AI-based technology to assist, augment, and automate operations, right through to reimagining business processes.
4. Embed ethics into everything: AI needs to be applied with an ethical and responsible approach – one that is transparent to users and customers, embeds privacy, ensures fairness, and builds trust. AI implementations should be transparent and unbiased, and open to disclosure and explanation.
5. Spur innovation for competitive advantage: AI provides enterprises with a chance to get ahead of the pack. It offers legacy enterprises the opportunity to leapfrog from their current market positions to those previously reserved for digitally native enterprises.

Ultimately, to thrive in an AI-fueled world, organizations must adapt or be left behind. At Capgemini, we believe that AI is something to be excited about – it has the potential to revolutionize businesses and the way we live for the better. Through Perform AI, we are helping companies to achieve their untapped potential and compete in the digital world. I hope you find these five guiding principles useful food for thought. Let me know what you think.