I starting to see a proliferation of the title "AI Strategist" these days. And not forgetting I am getting questions on whether companies need AI Strategist or not.
Here is my take!
Firstly, there are certain conditions that need to be met in your business before you starting thinking of hiring an AI strategist.
Data
We all know that AI works better when there are good quality data, followed by availability of relevant data. So you need to assess whether your business has an established data management process first. What is an established data management process then? It should have the following:
Are there established data storage and retrieval infrastructure? It needs to be something like a data warehouse, a SINGLE place where all the datasets goes to be stored and managed.
Are there data management process that accompanies the infrastructure? In order to ensure your data is of quality, it needs to be managed well to maintain high quality data. Not forgetting that there should be process to ensure high security and privacy level. These are processes that deals with Identity & Access Management or IAM in short.
Are you measuring data quality? Data quality needs to be measured so as to build up confidence in using data. Having established data quality metrics helps in showcasing to your stakeholders that the reports or derivative products from data such as insights, visualizations and analysis can be trusted.
Reporting
Have your organization optimized your reporting process using data? Why is business reporting important before coming to AI? In order to use data well, we need to understand its nuances like how and when are the data collected, what are the definitions of each columns found in the dataset. Only through a good understanding of these nuances, that are honed through multiple reporting, can we have a good understanding on what are the limitations from the data.
Establishing AI through your business requires change management extensively. This means that throughout your business, there is a need for everyone to understand how data and AI works, followed by everyone feels that they have benefitted from using data.
An optimized reporting process through out the company is a good signpost to say that your business and its employees have benefitted from data for their own tasks.
Do You Really Need AI?
After the above conditions are met, there is a good chance that if there are use cases in your organization, it can be successful. The biggest assumption here is IF there are use cases and IF there are many use cases.
AI is just part of the data toolkit. You can see AI as, besides the ubiquitous tools that you find in the toolkit like hammer, screwdrivers, etc, AI is that smart shiny drill that can auto-change the drill bit based on your needs.
From this analogy, you will realize that not all your business challenges are about "drilling" i.e. AI solves certain type of problems, not all problems. What does this translate? Now all the business problems you have needs AI, and followed by do you have enough AI use cases to justify hiring a full-time AI strategist?
Do not forget that AI use cases like any IT projects has costs to it, short-term being the proof-of-concept, design & planning, data management, training of the AI models, and long-term being the maintenance, constant monitoring and validation of AI models, cloud computing subscription, ensuring the essential skills stays within the organization.
GenAI
The past one year (2024), due to the proliferation of GenAI models and its ability to handle and work with different medium and cross-medium, we also see a surge of tools that takes advantage of GenAI. Just make a trip to AI Sumo, you will get what I mean. We have smarter software like Gamma that is able to, based on the outline provided, generate the slides with sleek designs for presentation purposes. As a good friend of mine, Paddy Tan, has coined the term "solopreneur", I do think it is now possible to run a business with 90% of the tasks covered by software agents that are available at a small month subscription. This will give startups a longer runway to scale and build up their business further.
What does this mean for larger businesses? They will need consultants for sure! Consultants that can look through the bigger business processes and identify the efficiency gaps that can be gained through these GenAI apps. However, there is a need for change management for this to occur. Employees has more fear than excitement when they realise that some of their tasks is going to be taken over by Artitificial Intelligence. Business owner cannot blame these employees for having such a notion, given how Artificial Intelligence these days are sold to the many. Change management needs to come in, to allay the fear and manage the uncertainty for these employees before GenAI apps can unleash the potential efficiency. Else the subscription fees will just go down the drain rather.
Switching Perspectives
Now put yourself in the shoes of an AI strategist, let us forget about his/her background, experience and suitability for the role for now. The AI strategist main role is to identify areas in the business where AI can be used, proposed the necessary changes that needs to be made, and how AI should be integrated into the business process, keeping in mind the alignment to strategic goals of the business.
Ever heard of the common saying, "To a hammer, everything is a nail." To an AI strategist...everything must use AI? Wait a minute! You probably realise right now, a few paragraphs before, we did mentioned that not all use cases need AI! AI is just one of the tools in the data toolkit! If a simple average is needed to solve a business challenge, why go through all the hassle and the costs (short- & long-term)?
While you can hire an AI Strategist to work out the GenAI Apps adoption but I doubt you can justify the salary paid to the AI Strategist just for that alone.
So What Do I Need?
Data will be the new normal, and taking advantage of data will be what good business leaders will constantly be thinking about. There are multiple tools, with variation in value derived from data, that business can take advantage of and Artificial Intelligence is part of it.
What you really need is a Data Strategist, that can help your business see end-to-end from data collection all the way to change management when the derivatives of data are being used in business processes.
As for how to select the Data Strategist for your organization, that can be a whole article by itself. (This goes the same for selecting an AI Strategist too.) But to give some quick pointers, the person needs to have background in the following:
- Data Management & Data Quality
- Data Analytics & Data Analysis
- Machine Learning, Model Deployment & Model Monitoring
- Generic Business Processes & Change Management
I can tell you very quickly such talents are not easy to find. But a word of caution, do not jump onto one because of the titles. Titles are very cheap to get and have, most important is their experience and background!
I wish your company all the best in building up data capabilities and taking advantage of data analytics and artificial intelligence (if any).
Want to have a chat? Look for me on LinkedIn!!