AI is happening today. Not tomorrow.

It was great to welcome CEOs, leaders and DGs to our AI and digital transformation workshop and roundtable discussion this week, hosted and facilitated by yours truly, and Digit.ai Senior Director, Tarek Elsadik.

Our Digit.ai workshops are a welcoming place for leaders to share their insights, challenges and success stories about AI and digital transformation in confidence and off-the-record.

However, there are some concepts that I can disclose and want to share with you as they are common challenges that organizations struggle with.

1.   Have a growth mindset

Many leaders and organizations get scared about what they don’t know, and this includes AI. But what if I told you that by implementing AI, you could reduce your turnaround time and operational costs, and improve your bottom-line?

For an organization I worked on in the past, we used Machine Learning & AI as a core component of the digital transformation. We were able to reduce a manual and paper-based intensive process that usually took one week to complete down to 20 minutes. All done in a single trip by a field agent and an iPad with a SIM card.

So rather than getting scared, imagine the possibilities. Take your education into your own hands. Be curious. Online and offline courses have never been more readily available, books (Exponential Organization by Salim Ismail is one of my favorites), podcasts, and online thought-leadership (follow Peter Diamandis on LinkedIn!) are all great ways to gain a better understanding of this technology.

2.   Ask: “How can we break things?”

This is a quote by my business hero Tom Peters and it's a phrase that I use frequently - perhaps not something you would typically hear a CEO say.

I also told my team to “go full throttle". My reasoning for this? Small failures lead to a big success.

Use available data to train and test your A.I. Split the data into segments: one for training, second for tuning, and third for accuracy checking.

3.   The digital skills gap is growing for mid-skill and high-level jobs

Surprisingly, the most challenging thing about implementing digital processors and AI is getting your team on board and changing the way that they think. It took me two years to learn this.

At the beginning, people are excited when you bring in new technology. But it’s like a wave: they jump on board, then they go back against it. They begin to question and to panic, wondering what will happen to their job if the machine is taking over. 

Show them the value by explaining that the machine is there to do all of the boring, mundane work (such as hours of paperwork!) so that they can put their time and energy towards more creative and complex tasks.

…And then set the expectation that in three months’ time you will expect double the paperwork! And in six months you will expect triple. So, they can either stay in the office late or they can use their digital twin to help them get it done.

I don’t believe in redundancies. Your people are the biggest asset of your organization. Re-train them, reposition them and prepare them for the impending digital future. This is the beauty of digital transformation.

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Remember that AI has been around for decades. We use AI without even being aware of it. I bet you are familiar with Apple’s personal assistant Siri, and you use predictive text when writing articles or text messages. Amazon’s algorithms acutely predict what products we have bought in the past. Even my new Volvo car has autonomous capabilities that have narrowly saved me from having a car crash two times already!

AI is happening today, not tomorrow, so ask yourself, “Will you be the disruptor or disrupted?”

For details and inquiries on upcoming training sessions or consultancy work, kindly contact Joanna.Villarino@xische.com.

Want to continue the discussion? Please comment below - I would love to hear your thoughts.