AI continues to be all the rage across Southeast Asia, and understandably so. When implemented, an effective AI strategy will enable businesses to streamline their processes — from improving their data readiness to people capabilities and technology workload.
Despite its benefits, not everyone is convinced about the business value of AI.
In fact, it’s common for employees and business leaders to lack trust in the technology or feel a strong sense of fear about their jobs being made complicated or redundant. According to Dataiku's third InfoBrief with IDC, only 39% of organisations across APAC have invested in AI to date, so these sentiments may be contributing to companies not taking the leap to kickstart their AI journeys.
Here’s the thing: AI adoption is becoming inevitable and businesses have to get on board or risk losing their competitive edge amongst their peers. Here are some ways businesses can counter any anxious sentiments and get employees on board for the transition.
The conversation
The challenge here is twofold.
First, employees being fearful of the introduction of AI to their work and what that means for their jobs. Without an understanding of its mechanics and use within the business, AI almost becomes a black box — creating a sense of fear and insecurity about what they don’t know or understand.
Then, there are business leaders who may not have the right understanding of AI and the benefits it can provide. In some cases, these organisational changes are left in the hands of the company’s CIO — who, while abreast with what AI should be, may need to partner with their business users and data stakeholders to ensure a company-wide adoption of AI.
Tackling these sentiments will require top-down guidance, coupled with broad participation in the process of developing and deploying AI. This is done by ensuring a business’s leadership team has the right understanding of AI and how it functions within their ecosystems. Once equipped with the right understanding, leaders can confidently empower their teams across the organisation to tap into the power of AI and the value it can provide. By having data experts collaborate with their colleagues who are experts in their business domain, they can build powerful AI capabilities that are relevant to the business and are accepted as helpful innovations. This democratised model, centred on collaboration between colleagues with different skills will also ease anxiety and fear among employees and instead encourage them to evolve in their roles with the incorporation of AI.
The foundation
To cement the trust and confidence of both business leaders and employees within the organisation, adopting the appropriate AI solution that serves to provide unparalleled value will be important.
AI strategies are not one size fits all and organisations must ensure that they are adopting a strategy that is aligned with their ultimate goals. At Dataiku, we use the 5E framework.
When formulating an AI strategy as a business, we need to:
- Explore: Explore what AI means to the business, define priorities, and solidify the reasons to leverage AI
- Experiment: Estimate the value of AI with early projects and raise overall awareness
- Establish: Create tangible value from initial use cases and lay foundations for scalability of the business’s framework
- Expand: Expand the business’s use of AI across all departments within the organisation and accelerate overall business value
- Embed: Embed the use of AI across all businesses activities and ensure that it is part of the organisation’s DNA
Unlike traditional software, complex AI solutions require an extensive data model lifecycle, and as a result, greater localisation and ongoing customisation. Despite this, Dataiku’s InfoBrief revealed that less than 40% of APAC organisations currently have enterprise-wide strategies to coordinate their AI investments.
By having a clear strategy in place, businesses will set the stage for wider adoption across the organisation, gain employee trust, and empower them to adopt and embed Everyday AI culture into the way they operate.
The augmented intelligence solution
Successful AI adoption for businesses strikes a balance between AI and incorporating human elements, which is achieved through augmented intelligence. This approach brings together the strengths of AI in conjunction with essential human capabilities, integrating systems into an employee’s day-to-day work to enable them to make better decisions.
How does this work? Essentially, AI is used as a guide, with people at the helm of insights-driven decision-making. Keeping this human perspective will allow companies to make changes while taking context into account. This also ensures that companies will be able to override any potential biases that may be pre-programmed into the data that is being processed for AI insights.
Augmented AI also allows teams to move beyond spending time collecting data to being the ones in the driver's seat. By doing so, employees will be entrusted with greater responsibilities, elevating their critical thinking when it comes to vital business decisions. Ultimately, this will encourage employees to be more invested in the business as it evolves, and help you keep employee turnover rates low.
When adopted and integrated successfully, augmented intelligence will allow businesses to create accurate and scalable solutions while developing employees’ trust in the technology.
The culture around data
Realistically, creating a lasting data culture in your company will not happen overnight. Time is needed and the responsibility falls on business leaders to communicate their insights and perspectives over data and technology across the organisation.
To build a strong data culture, leaders need to recognise how the company makes decisions and determine what needs to be changed. Instead of looking at data from a surface level and purely data lens, leaders will need to think about their data holistically and observe how team members make decisions about changing processes. Rather than devoting time only to moonshot projects, focusing on slightly new perspectives with regards to an existing problem will be able to create more long-term change within the organisation’s ecosystem.
Leaders need to aim to make AI pervasive as opposed to it being a “special event.” This can be done by embedding business translators into the organisation to effectively communicate business needs into data needs. Translators, when injected into appropriate pockets of the business, will enable organisations to better identify true business needs from data and AI. However, it is important to remember that data initiatives cannot exist as a stand-alone island — even with translators. It is vital for leaders to ensure that they move beyond the typical relationship of businesses sending requests to their data teams. Rather, both parties need to adopt synergy in thinking which will enable the change of culture for good over time, establishing bridges in both directions.
Lastly, ensuring that the conditions within the organisation are favourable in establishing an ongoing idea factory. Building capacity within and outside of data teams to garner ideas from different profiles across the organisation will inevitably lead to a stronger data culture over time.
AI can be daunting, but its adoption is not impossible. Understanding AI’s capabilities and the adoption of the right tools will enable businesses to speed up the integration of AI systems and keep the adoption process easy for everyone across the organisation. This, in turn, accelerates the overall process and allows employees to visualise the business value of AI. With trust and transparency, leaders will be able to ensure that they can get their employees on board for the AI transition.
