If you think that hiring data scientists or deploying machine learning algorithms makes your organization an AI-driven company, you may be completely wrong. Indeed, you may be anything but AI-driven.
To be totally straightforward, in the scenario above, you may be like one of those retailers that, back during the .com bubble, thought it had become a « web-driven company » simply by creating a web portal, maybe with some e-commerce. Those retailers, indeed, remained « classical retailers, » but with a web portal. In those cases, they hadn’t done what was required to become web-driven, such as embracing dynamic pricing, transforming logistics, decentralizing decisions and reorganizing operations (much like Amazon).
Similarly, becoming an AI-driven company is a top strategic endeavor. It’s a cultural change. It’s a people challenge. And it requires changes in many fundamentals of your organization. Here are my perspectives and learnings on this from the field.
AI-Driven Strategy
First, becoming AI-driven means associating your core strategy and competitiveness with the usage of data and AI. Your strategy must be underpinned by a thorough, up-to-date data acquisition strategy. After all, AI is intelligence derived from data. So, data should be your very first focus for becoming AI-driven.