Council Post: 15 Tech Leaders’ Tips For Developing An AI Strategy For Your Business

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Significant advancements in artificial intelligence are causing companies to pause and rethink their business plans. Businesses and consumers alike use AI on a daily basis, and it’s becoming a growing force throughout many industries.

While artificial intelligence seems to be in every company’s future (if they’re not already using it), how will a business leader know when it’s time to make an AI plan—and how should they begin? Below, 15Forbes Technology Council members share their insights on AI for businesses and how companies should go about implementing this fast-evolving technology.

1. Include AI in your overall business roadmap.

A business roadmap with an AI plan needs to focus on what access business leaders want to create, what innovations to invest in and what capacity they need to build to achieve their business goals. It’s expensive to make changes to AI solutions, so plan effectively to remove biases, understand policy and workflow automation, and drive data-focused decision-making. -Chaitra Vedullapalli,Women in Cloud

Sooner or later, all roads will lead to AI, as it will be a crucial driver of sustainable growth. Companies will need AI to stay competitive, improve efficiency and continuously deliver an excellent customer experience. However, the success of AI implementation will be determined by setting clear goals, carefully planning the operational aspects of deployment and not forgetting human intelligence. -Vasudeva Akula,VOZIQ

While I believe it’s only a matter of time before AI becomes ubiquitous, developing an AI plan is usually not a good first step. Before you implement an AI plan, you need a data strategy. Solid, quality data is the prerequisite to transformational AI. As a result of advances in synthetic data techniques, acquiring that data need not be as costly or time-consuming as it used to be. -Corey Jaskolski,Synthetaic

When implementing AI, organizations must start with realistic expectations and measurable business outcomes. AI can’t be viewed as a “fix-it-all,” because it’s not. Assessing the business value of an AI use case is a start. Then consider feasibility—that entails consulting with people who know the data well and the engineers and data scientists who know how to apply the relevant AI frameworks and algorithms. -Alexandre Bilger,Sinequa

Companies avoiding an AI strategy are destined to fail. AI technologies such as optical character recognition and machine learning are now more accessible to non-technical employees and partners through no-code/low-code platforms and B2B online marketplaces. They are also in high demand as more digital workers augment a staff’s daily tasks, including working with unstructured documents such as invoices, utility bills, IDs and contracts. -Anthony Macciola,ABBYY

The right AI strategy for a company completely depends on their business and the challenges they are trying to solve. The use of AI in identifying revenue-impacting customer-experience issues is something I’m seeing a lot of right now as companies try to avoid customer churn and grow revenues. -Sarika Khanna,Medallia

7. Focus on enabling your employees to be more effective.

AI can often sound “buzz-wordy.” At the end of the day, every company needs to have a strategy along with data and a way to utilize insights in a smart, algorithmic way. Good AI will enable your company’s employees to be more effective—especially those without classical data science training. And it should drive impactful results without huge sacrifices to your tech infrastructure. -Diane Keng,Breinify

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AI is the glue that stitches analytics results with actions. What we learn from data is translated into action, and that action can automatically be acted upon. AI interprets the data and triggers the action, taking away the need for human action and speeding the process. AI is no longer optional. -Sherlock Holmes,Genware Computer Systems Inc.

9. Ensure your AI tools can integrate with your existing tech.

There are no more hours in the day, so increased productivity comes from using those hours better—which is why AI is a critical aspect of a business’ strategy. Creating an AI strategy starts with choosing tools and making sure they can integrate with the technology you already use. Implementing an AI strategy without connecting your disparate data sources won’t generate the necessary insights. -Craig Walker,Dialpad

Only companies that want to survive need AI plans. Enterprises that want to thrive must incorporate natural language processing. Why? NLP is the glue that connects people with content. And it’s the only technology that unifies content and people, translating what people say and want into content. This is why analysts predict most enterprise content will be accessed by AI models in five years. -Igor Jablokov,Pryon

Not every company needs an AI plan, but machine learning can have a major impact on efficiency, productivity and decision-making if employed effectively. It also facilitates product discovery, content curation and personalized experiences. But AI isn’t a fix for inadequate software or a mediocre platform. If your data is lacking, you could end up with tools that create biases and inaccuracies. -Fred de Gombert,Akeneo

To make the advance of AI sustainable, companies first have to think about security. The tricky part is that traditional defensive measures reduce the accuracy of the original model, so companies are reluctant to implement them. This is a potentially huge problem for AI—the model accuracy will keep increasing, but if robustness issues are not addressed, there will be significant fallout. -Tom Okman,Nord Security

Due to the exploding attack surface, cyber defenders can no longer keep up with finding and fixing vulnerabilities before they are exploited. With AI, organizations can automate their cybersecurity posture and avoid data breaches. To get started, pick one or two cybersecurity workflows involving repeated analysis of large datasets and kick off a pilot project to automate these with AI. -Gaurav Banga,Balbix

14. Plan for AI to benefit, not displace, your workforce.

The future is indeed AI for everyone. AI automates mostly monotonous tasks so humans can do higher-level work. There are tasks—such as design and management—that AI can’t do yet that are ideal for humans. Employees can advance their careers this way, but companies need to plan to ensure their workforce is well-trained and that AI does not displace workers, but benefits them. -Mercedes Soria,Knightscope

A future without AI does not exist. Healthcare organizations in particular should start preparing for the clinical and operational impact of AI by doing two key things. The first is to establish criteria for responsible and safe AI consumption. The other is to establish ethics boards that can serve to govern and enforce the consistent application of AI consumption criteria. -Trisha Swift,ZeOmega Population Health Solutions