[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to Enterprise agility podcast I'm your host John Lim we got two great guests who you hear from shortly San deep Dar and Andy Jordan today we diving into our next series which covers a topic I'm sure no one has ever heard of before right Andy that topic is Genera of AI if you have heard of it you'll be aware of the idea that it's r finding work if you believe all the headlines everyone's going to be unemployed we're all going to be replaced by intelligent software and and no one's going to have a job anymore well I certainly hope my job is not being replaced but yeah bringing back to the point geni isn't Tru that simple right and it still has lots of room to mature and there's a lot of issues that have to be addressed and organizations are trying to figure out what is it that they need to do with with AI how can they best use it how can they ensure that they're getting benefits from it and not being misled how can they deal with all the issues around legal and privacy and ethics and all this kind of stuff and fortunately people like San are putting a lot of thought into this so let me throw it over you San and start with a really simple question when you're talking with clients when when you're having conversations with them what are you seeing about the state of geni in their organizations how are they responding how are they looking to adopt it what's their attitudes towards this disruptive technology hey thanks for the warm welcome Andy now I have been involved and having conversations with customers on their geni Journey over the last 12 months or so and I see how they are gradually progressing on their maturity Journey with Gen for example the first time we inter Ed with our customers which was about this time last year in the Amsterdam technology workflow Summit there was a lot of uncertainty technology leaders and enthusiasts knew the high potential of this now ready to use Tech but we're very unsure of how they really fit in their technology landscape uh what kind of risk did it bring in and and what were the use cases beyond the regular content generation and from an organization leadership perspective they knew they had to respond but they didn't know exactly how fast forward 12 months I have interacted with room full of customers in our last service n Summit in Amsterdam and Brussels a few weeks ago when I asked them do you know what your your company strategy is on gen majority of them answered a resounding yes does it mean that they have figured out everything uh I actually don't think so and in that Summit there was also a gen customer panel and there were three things which came out pretty significantly uh in that panel that I want to share with our listeners today the first one is uh these panel members shared with us is that uh use AI to solve your business challenge it should not be seen within the technology alone the second is AI use cases and ideas come from the business and not just it and the third one which they shared is that uh from a leadership perspective they feel the pressure to jump on AI uh but what they have realized is that they need to be careful as well so there's a lot of still a lot of unknowns uh but at least many companies now have a strategic Direction and this is a brilliant example where the whole leadership team of an organization along with the leadership from the business the CIO the head of Enterprise architecture they have come together collaborated to come up with their gen strategy to set these strategic priorities and how they would adopt this technology to achieve realistic business outcomes customers are now able to look Beyond this gen hype and are actually now coming up with very realistic plans to guide the whole organization that's excellent it's it's good to see that in such a short period of time you said first conversations just 12 months ago how quickly organizations have evolved but I can imagine that there are leaders listening to us now who are thinking well okay but I've got a million other priorities and I've only got so many things that I can deliver here I've only got so many resources I've only got so much money just to invest why is it that every organization should be developing this gen strategy now and how do they then go about converting strategy into reality what do they need to do when it comes to the execution of an AI strategy excellent question Andy for the argument sake let's assume that a particular organization doesn't set that strategic Direction what happens then the good news is that they will be able to get started with Gen typically they will start in it uh carve out a team call them something like the AI incubation team and they will experiment with geni monitor industry learnings develop out of the possible and also share their challenges and successes uh with the other teams a lot of AI specific risks like hallucinations reputational risks are are also identified at this stage and many of the customers that I have spoken to actually began this way now the bad news companies can be shortsighted if they keep this within it only this means this team will miss out on a lot of valuable use cases which might have been possible to even come from the business counterparts and the whole nature of this Tex is that is it forces us to think about the outcomes before we engage the technology for example would the company just want to focus on reducing cost with AI or would it also fuel Revenue growth and maybe even enter into a new market with AI so this shortsighted local experimentations eventually lead to very noncohesive reive results and this is where company leadership should step in and uh there are a couple of things actually two things that they can do and they should do the first one is that leadership team should help to break these organizational silos and help to set up something like an AI Center of Excellence uh which is both it and business Representatives and the second is to set the Strategic direction for this Coe and the rest of the organization which will help them to identify and prioritize The Right Use cases now in return what leadership expects from the Coe are well the value of the Investments on AI projects experimentations and uh what sort of uh new Talent uh that the company should be hiring in addition to this leadership thinks in terms of business value return on investment Roi and rightfully so now Gartner for example has stated that a significant number of J projects actually as big as 30% of these projects will be abandoned and one of the main reason uh for this is unclear business value so Andy if you really think about it business value is actually a great tool for the AI Center of Excellence to properly prioritize the numerous use cases which they would be receiving based on the business value right and we will talk more about this in our next podcast now I want to highlight another major challenge which I believe is the biggest challenge which will stop organizations to reap the full benefit of gen so Andy do you have any favorite guess about this I can think of a million things that might stop full potential but in my experience organizations usually create problems for themselves so it's probably an internal issue yes that's act actually you are uh pretty close uh to what I have in mind so the biggest challenge in my opinion is the lack of Enterprise agility and this is a big challenge to execute not just gen strategy but any strategy uh in fact and this is where leadership uh Ai and the delivery team need to think beyond their silos and adopt a framework to make sure that work flows across the whole organization connecting every Department every business unit and aligning work to company's strategic priorities now I want to summarize this conversation with two main points for our listeners today the first one is create your gen strategy if if you haven't already done so because other companies in your industry are really doing that right now and if you're someone who is involved or leading AI programs or projects check with your leadership for those strategic directions the second is think about properly executing your gen strategy make sure that you are setting up your teams for success by removing organizational blocks and giving them the right tools and Frameworks to succeed and we will double click on this topic in our next podcast so stay tuned [Music]