Strategy Leads AI Investment, Not the Other Way Around
In a recent survey by software giant SAP, it was found that with the rise of AI, organizations have come increasingly under pressure to make digital transformation (DT) investments. However, the report also found that many are doing so not from any in-depth internally led research or competitive growth analysis but more so because of the hype and fascination surrounding new AI releases.
Today’s business leaders may have developed deep expertise and niche skillsets within their respective specializations; however, they continue to face new challenges as innovation rapidly evolves and increasingly becomes more demanding. The trailblazers who were once long-time successful specialists are now confronted with the advancing digital global economy, feeling the pressure to keep up with innovative solutions. The realization and effectiveness of decisioning on factual information against intuition have become more evident than ever.
The survey went on to highlight that 61% of respondents said they were planning on spending on AI tools in 2023, with 39% of respondents saying that they weren’t planning on spending funds on AI tools in 2023. In both cases, the answers were not based on any particular discovered business or industry insights but more on general sentiment and anxieties surrounding AI.
However, for the future success of any business, it is imperative to recognize technologies’ extraordinary enterprise worth and apply it effectively to the right value-advancing tasks and processes. With its ability to deliver tremendous value to the enterprise, AI can span across many domains, driving specialized algorithmic solutions throughout the process. However, without a guiding growth-focused strategy firmly in place, AI can end up causing more problems for the organization than it set out to solve.
Like all technology and related, AI represents the continuation of automation that drives civilizations...technology is intrinsically an extension of us. Therefore, for all practical purposes related to business growth, AI is simply a set of tools to be applied purposefully. But must be driven and managed by strategy.
So, jumping into any new technology without a strategy in place will see you drowning in the abyss of willful ignorance.
Well-run businesses require confident and well-informed leadership — systems thinking and not following the herd or being triggered by hysteria.
Successful technology/business transformations of the past were always mindful of the dangers of “over-pivoting… to pure dot com experiences, which were fool’s errands” says SAP. Therefore, investing in AI-related technologies and platforms without first developing an informed business strategy to lead the way, will become rudderless navigation.
A well-balanced growth solution approach, with adherence to both human inputs and intelligent machine inputs, has shown over time to be the best risk-adjusted approach to business transformation.
Regardless of the solutions sought, from developing new IP to generating new business, opportunities must be well managed. How a company uses advanced technologies to create value has become the defining business challenge of our time; ap3 applied intelligence strategy-building software is proficient in answering the 21st-century challenges.
By combining machine computational power and managed by human ingenuity and general intelligence, ap3 becomes your very useful business partner in riding the growth trajectory you've set out.
ap3 works with leaders from within the organization, enabling them to make the right decisions in protecting their position, re/pre-establish relevancy, or prepare to lead the future.
Through a highly defined framework which internalizes processes, ap3 assists managers in building coherent strategic plans that can be taken to commercialization, and tactically executed. ap3 has a significant range; of technical and business model innovations on the supply side to those applied intelligence moves that shape the growth trajectory.
Managers know their business best and partnering with ap3, puts them in control to articulate the corporation’s growth objectives in developing an informed insights-based roadmap to achieving goals. By utilizing ap3, managers can leverage their real business and industry experience, to leverage AI and create and apply strategies that work. This also helps managers to operate in confidence and avoid turning to time-wasting, overpriced consultants; who just tell you what you already know.
Instead, they leverage ap3’s applied intelligence system and knowledge bases and strategy development frameworks to do great things! All at a fraction of the cost of fake knowledge consultants.
So it’s not about Digital Transformation necessarily, it remains about business growth and having the right growth strategy established first!
Hence, we cannot put the cart before the horse (technology before strategy,) we must build efficiently coherent and warrantable business strategies more scientifically. Then look for and apply the right technology tools specifically to those defined value-adding tasks and growth objectives of the enterprise.
Business managers are also too busy managing and don’t have time to become topic experts nor do they have the discretionary budgets. R&D budgets are usually found with huge corporations, and oftentimes these corporations end up hiring big consultancy firms to do the jobs that their managers were hired to do in the first place. Adding unnecessary costs, and degrading the learning curve of staff that are left to execute after the "expert consultant" leaves.
The majority of those consultant reports are not executed or are not optimally executed. Doing more harm than good.
According to Forbes, “Businesses are better off internalizing their strategy process because consultants are basically telling you what you already know. And much of the information we can find ourselves.”
And a dirty little secret is, often enough, executives hire consultants so as not to take responsibility themselves if things go off the rails. They can blame the consultants instead. The big consulting firms have become particularly good at manipulating fragile managers, to hire them for their own job security — self-preservation objectives.
Fragile managers are not entrepreneurial and become liabilities to growth and high performance and consultants encourage that to their benefit.
Acclaimed professor Mariana Mazzucato, in her most recent book titled THE BIG CON — How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies; says that the overuse of consultants, both by private businesses and governments “stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability.”
So, the reality is, that access to useful and reliable information can be found digitally and utilized effectively through the rightly focused and user-friendly enterprise software. ap3 is highly focused, task-driven and built on retrieving the right knowledge bases to provide users with the competitive advantages they need for growth.
The capable and entrepreneurial managers can now break out, and move aggressively with confidence knowing they are acting on empirically warrantable insights. Better growth-focused managers enhance enterprise value, and of course, render grossly overpaid and useless consultants obsolete.
In a Harvard Business Review survey of 10, 000 senior leaders, 97% said that strategy is the most important thing to their organization’s success. However, 96% said that they lack the time and the right tools to engage in winning strategy development within their organizations.
Douglas Blackwell’s, ap3 software offers the enterprise of the future, the one-stop digital do-it-yourself solution to compete and win in the 21st century. At a fraction of the cost of big consultants!
ap3 serves as an Insight Engine for capacity and capabilities building and as a built-in risk management tool. It fills the gap between the useful value functions available from big data and artificial intelligence. The human executive decisioning process remains highly necessary, more so in the digital era, in building winning strategies while genuinely adhering to social and environmental responsibilities.
Avoiding the abyss of wasting precious time and money, shifting responsibilities to still wet behind the ear new business school grads posing as ‘expert’ consultants; but who have no actual business experience. Is holding back many organizations from accelerating and capturing opportunity in the new global economy.
People need to do their jobs and employers need to give them the right tools to do it!
Serious firms can’t continue to pay outrageous fees to essentially have their managers babysit new college-grads-consultants while they produce useless PowerPoint presentations.
Also, one of the other key insights found in the SAP survey is that increasingly, managers and staff are wasting an incredible amount of time online with social media. “Searching” for management and growth insights to apply to their work. However, phony fluffy announcements of nothingness and making ‘friends’, complaining and quietly looking for new positions, instead of doing the work of their firms — is what is really going on.
“Increasingly, B2B eCommerce execs are using social networks like LinkedIn, and B2B communities like the Master B2B Forum, to learn about [growing their business.]” — SAP.
Social media culture on company time has hindered productivity gains. The general stats on productivity gains in the last 10 years say it has basically remained flat.
Therefore, internalizing the strategy process within the organization is the right approach in a competitive world.
B2B eCommerce designated teams, for example, must not think about AI investments in isolation, nothing exists or functions on its own. I.e., deploying an AI chatbot, how to collect more data, or we need more machine learning etc. Management must find what specific technology or process can best facilitate enterprise growth through a process of logic and iteration. Then make those AI investments accordingly.
The more critical questions that need to be asked, are the ones having to do more with customer service experiences, effective integration into the eCommerce, optimal distribution channels efficiency, and how to leverage technology to maximize growth and profitability. Just to name a few. These more focused strategic questions will lead to the effective utility of technology.
ap3 offers four (corporate, business, functional, operational) pillar strategy frameworks that managers can work with because every business is different, and faces its own unique challenges. Therefore, having a robust and flexible business partner like ap3 that can respond to critical challenges is an essential business asset.
Here are a few critical pillars of the ap3 frameworks:
Product Strategy
Teams across ideation, research, planning, prototyping, sourcing, and costing of new products and services.
Data Analytics
Finding meaningful patterns in data through discovery, thoughtful interpretation and story-styled communication.
Data Security
Protecting data from unauthorized access and data corruption throughout its lifecycle is a lifestyle.
Data Science
Leveraging data to accelerate the broader understanding of the world to maximize your demand trajectory and manage risk.
Complex Organizational Problems
Vast experience and capabilities to explain data to diverse internal and external stakeholders to identify and deliver on organizational transformations.
Informed versus uninformed decisioning is always best and understanding the limitations scientifically, is critical to innovation and the effective use of time and resources.
The primary focus must not be on ‘AI investments’, it must be on growth! Building winning growth strategies to effectively help managers make critical business decisions with confidence, about the right AI investments to make.
In the end, ap3 is the power tool solution to deliver winning strategies associated with the iconic Blue Ocean Strategy.
Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.
ap3: A focused data-centric and applied intelligence process that underwrites bankable Blue Ocean Strategies!
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