Why You Should Look Across Your Entire Organization for AI Use Cases
Teams within your organization may start using AI to solve specific challenges, but letting each group attempt to self-organize increases the likelihood of missed opportunities and potential inefficiencies.
As highlighted in how to identify and prioritize use cases for AI, the ideal path forward is creating a cross-functional team and engaging lead stakeholders from each department.
This approach has three critical benefits:
Find common use cases that span multiple departments
Identify shared dependencies across business processes, systems, and data
Proactively address hesitation about adopting new technology
Find common use cases
While departments serve different functions, many of their core activities can benefit from AI in similar ways. These patterns often emerge during stakeholder discussions or while analyzing your list of potential use cases.
A few universal examples are:
Drafting communications to send via email or chat
Processing and extracting data from documents
Personalizing content based on your prospect, customer, product, or service
Summarizing and analyzing information for decision-making
If you're struggling to identify these, define each use case with an abstraction of what it is, which is borderline an oversimplification that is devoid of details.
Identify shared dependencies
By looking holistically at your organization, you can identify and prioritize shared dependencies, which may bleed into the other digital transformation projects that you have (e.g. identifying and prioritizing automation, shifting to another omni-channel marketing platform).
Even if you can't implement an end-to-end solution immediately, knowledge of the impact and how shared dependencies affect each use case can:
Unlock immediate value for multiple teams
Create foundation for more comprehensive solutions
Free up constrained resources that impact other business processes
A classic pattern is to find the most painful part of a use case and solve just that portion, even if the entire use case could be solved later when shared dependencies are addressed.
Proactively address hesitation
While AI discussions often focus on optimists versus catastrophists, most of your stakeholders likely fall somewhere in between: they want thoughtful progress that delivers real value.
Focusing on the entire organization allows for classifying stakeholders based on their level of eagerness and optimism, along with demonstrating that your organization takes digital changes seriously and intentionally.
TLDR: A holistic approach helps identify shared use cases and dependencies, while addressing any hesitation to change and the large shift that AI offers.
