In this 45-second read, we identifty 5 essential elements of any AI effort that will help you identify, capture, and communicate the value / ROI of an AI investment.
AI is becoming ubiquitous…it’s difficult to find a corner of the corporate world untouched by AI. AI dominates The WSJ headlines – just today they shared McCormick, Conagra, and Pepsico are using AI to cook up new foods, unanimous.ai and Advanced Symbolics correctly predicted battleground states and election results correctly, respectively, and Takeda / AWS are partnering to use AI / Cloud to accelerate virtually their entire enterprise. And with COVID, AI’s becoming even more valued as everything-online becomes the norm.
And of course this means lots of investment, under the premise that it will help the companies. But how? As it turns out, pinning down the ROI of AI down presents a challenge – for at least a few companies, if not the majority, the AI is missing. And why?
The natural tendency is to blame the technology – wrong platform, missing data, poor training, missed human intervention, scarcity of data scientists to build out the right algorithms and filter bias, etc. – the literature is chock-full of detail on what can go wrong, technically. Academics, consultants and countless others have been writing about the technical aspects of AI for decades, so there isn’t a mystery as to why technology could emerge from the lineup as the prime suspect. Missing, though, are several other aspects of achieving the AI ROI – those elements that integrate AI ROI with the business – and as integrating AI into core company business at scal is fairly new, there isn’t the same body of knowledge to reference…
Via our work at a leading AI-Platform company, we’ve identifie five key elements that will help you realize the ROI for AI: 1) the AI Concept itself – should align to business strategy AND be capable of generating necessary returns, 2) the Value Case (which we’ll write about shortly), linking the AIconcept to key outcomes, KPI’s, OKR’s, and as importanly, corresponding measurement system, 3) Technical Core Execution – Structuring the effort + product delivery, 4) the AI Operating Model, changes in process, organization, roles & responsibilities, and information flows, to sustain / operate / improve the performance, and 5) Executive engagement, to enroll key executives in the process, developing responsibility and accountability for concept, value, measurements, results, and ongoing contribution / impact to the business.
Of these five elements, we find the *most* neglected tend to include the value case, as well as executive engagement, which explains a lot about the missing ROI: if you don’t know what the ROI’s supposed to be and/or you don’t have an executive that’s willing to contribute to and own the results, it logically follows there won’t be a (good) ROI story to tell.
Solera Strategies 