Getting Started with AI: A Comprehensive Guide

Why AI is Essential for Organisations

To start, we need to explore the critical reasons why AI is essential within an organisation. Foremost, AI tools can significantly enhance efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable time for employees to focus on higher-level strategic activities. This automation not only boosts productivity but also reduces the likelihood of human errors, leading to more accurate and reliable outcomes.

AI can provide deeper insights through data analysis. By sifting through vast amounts of data at speeds unattainable by human workers, AI can identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that can inform decision-making processes. This capability is particularly valuable in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and marketing, where data-driven insights are paramount.

It’s also important to recognize the impact of AI on employee well-being. By taking over mundane and time-consuming tasks, AI allows employees to engage in more meaningful and creative work, which can enhance job satisfaction and reduce burnout. However, it’s crucial to ensure that staff have the necessary training and support to adapt to new technologies, fostering a positive and collaborative work environment.

Measuring Success with AI

Once we have addressed why AI is required, it is important to look at how success will be measured within your own organisation. Some of the KPIs used could be:

• Increased Revenue: You will be able to see this by the sales team being able to close more deals by responding to more RFPs and building more within the pipeline. Retaining customers through faster and improved customer service being delivered. Being able to release more products to the market along with streamlining your existing products by using AI to speed time to market.
• Cost Savings: Reducing the amount of work that needs to be done by a contractor or outsourced. Reducing the amount of time an employee needs to spend on a task.
• Cost Avoidance: Avoiding additional hiring costs as employees are able to focus more on the work and less on admin-heavy tasks.
• Well-being: Reduce turnover and associated hiring costs as employees have the right tools they need to be able to complete the work they need to complete. Speed of onboarding new staff by allowing staff to use AI to find the right resources for themselves. Promoting upskilling within the organisation.

Breaking Down Time Savings

So how is this all broken down to show that time is being saved? Well, typically on tasks we have not always captured how long it takes an individual to complete so let’s take a look at some of the tasks that the World Trade Index has completed.

• Summarizing a Meeting: Without the use of AI, this task would have taken around 43 minutes to complete. Now, with using AI within the meeting and employees having the right tools, this can be done within 11 minutes by using Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Searching for Information: This could be looking over a complicated and aging file server with lots of stale data or just trying to find the right information for them within the internet. Without the use of AI, this task would have taken around 24 minutes; with AI, this takes 18 minutes.
• Writing a First Draft of a Document: Without AI, this would have taken 14 minutes; now with AI, this can be done in as little as 8 minutes.

Implementing AI in Leadership

We need to start off with the leadership. It is critical that the leadership within the organisation develop capabilities to leverage AI for business outcomes. This includes foundational learning to understand what AI is and how it can help, building the business strategy so the organisation has a clear vision on how AI is going to be used, and setting up the AI center of excellence to allow for key people from each team to drive the changes together.

Human Change Management

Next, we need to move on to the human change, managing the human transformation through a robust user onboarding and enablement program. If the employees are not supported as part of the enablement, then it is going to be very hard to get them to start using it and see the business outcomes we have identified. Some of the ways this can be done is by investing in an employee experience platform such as Microsoft Viva, improving the culture, and authentically integrating feedback.

Technical Skills Development

Of course, we also have the technical skills that we need to look at from giving our employees access to the AI center of excellence and providing training so they understand how to use the AI tools.

This is then broken down into different milestones starting with the get ready phase, moving on to the onboarding and engaging, delivering the impact we have outlined, and then extending and optimizing the deployment.