Top-Down Gen AI Initiatives Will Fail
For Gen AI initiatives to succeed they must be driven from the bottom up. Business users must define Gen AI use cases that drive an ROI.
When I read about Gen AI pilots where the driving factor is the CEO I think to myself that such pilots are doomed to fail. I imagine the CEO of a company in any industry who heard about Gen AI some months ago at a dinner party or read about it in the Economist on a flight out to the west coast. The CEO calls his/her CIO and asks “what are we doing about AI?” failing of course to distinguish between AI’s many permutations. The CIO and a handful of Business Unit leaders then quickly assemble a poorly thought out Gen AI pilot where the business outcome is poorly defined, the expected ROI is poorly defined, the right internal people are not assembled for the Gen AI swat team and the enterprise data is poorly understood.
Gen AI projects like any AI project need to be organic – they need to come from within the business – created to solve a business problem, to improve a customer value proposition, to enhance product ROI, to improve the service delivery model. Example: You like the colors blue and white? How about this blue and white Nike sneaker with this unique design created especially for you? Click here to Buy Now. That is an example of how Gen AI could create revenue lift for an apparel company (automatically creating a unique, personalized sneaker design by leveraging known customer preferences). Much work is needed to get to that end state from having clean customer preference data to having the ability to execute a natural language conversation across multiple languages. Business users are far more qualified to achieve that end state (using the proper tools), than are C-Suite executives.