Blueprint 1:
Orient yourself and your organization

Blueprint 1: Orient yourself and your organization

It seems like everyone is either investigating or actively implementing generative AI or LLM-based technology.

But before you dive in headfirst, you need to understand the potential benefits as well as the potential risks.

Start by demystifying the hype, rumors, and misinformation surrounding generative AI and LLMs and clearly outline the true opportunities and risks they present to your organization. 

Educate yourself

Your IT department, business leaders, and target business function areas must familiarize themselves with the core capabilities of generative AI.

Review the primary generative AI platforms and assess their strengths and weaknesses.

Invest in an AI literacy program for your employees to help dispel myths and increase familiarity with, and willingness to use, generative AI.

Focus on low-hanging fruit

Identify and target your highest-value business processes that have the most measurable ROI and fastest implementation times.

Today, about 75% of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across four areas:

Customer operations.
Sales and marketing.
Software engineering.
Research and development^1.

¹The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier. McKinsey & Company. Michael Chui, Eric Hazan, Roger Roberts, et al. June 14, 2023.

Identify change agents

Generative AI adoption can be a cultural disruption for your organization. Identify key stakeholders who will champion change and transform organizational culture. Include them in building effective programs such as:

Steering committees: Include executive leadership, business leaders, SMEs, and generative AI leaders to help manage adoption and change.
Innovation program: Cross-functional change agents who will help guide use case identification, prioritization, and development. This group connects high-traffic business processes to AI solutions and helps generate momentum by focusing early efforts on low-hanging fruit.
Enablement program: Embeds changes in daily processes and models the behaviors you want to see in your organization.
Responsibility program: Develops and communicates guidelines for responsible AI use and defines business processes that recognize and reward employees by acknowledging change, incentivizing alignment to change, and celebrating small wins.

Technology

Understand what generative AI does well

Change management strategy

When implementing generative AI, a comprehensive change management strategy is crucial to ensure a successful adoption that covers:

People-centric approach: Identify key stakeholders, develop communication plans, create training programs, and appoint change champions.
Process optimization: Identify business processes that will benefit from generative AI, redesign processes with AI in mind, ensure data quality and governance, and apply agile implementation.
Technology integration: Evaluate AI technology based on your needs, define policies of AI tool usage, and use data-driven decision-making to drive process improvements.

How SHI can help:

Our AI experts help orient your organization with hands-on strategy and advisement workshops, including:

Establishing a generative AI program briefing
Security in AI briefing
Microsoft 365 copilot strategy briefing
AI technical training services
Free education/high-value assets (webinars, blogs, etc.)

Blueprint 1: Orient yourself and your organization