What is the main issue when you come up with a great A.I. case and try to implement it in the organization ? It’s getting buy in from the business and aleviating concerns and possible fear from the work force.
It even gets worse when decisions are taken by a machine and the algorithm dynamically assigns tasks to people. I’m experiencing this first hand, right now. Preparing the business is as hard as devising the deep learning algorithm and even more time consuming.
This is an interesting article:
https://www.infosys.com/insights/ai-automation/Pages/people-in-your-organization.aspx
(here is a copy)
Are
People in Your Organization Ready for AI
“I see the movement towards AI and robotics as evolutionary, in large
part because it is such a sociological leap. The technology may be ready, but
we are not – at least, not yet.”
– Geoff Livingstone,
President of Tenacity5 Media
As we adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) and prepare for extensive
automation of our industries, organizations and jobs for better revenue and
efficiency, business leaders not only need to comprehend the intricacies of the
technology but more importantly prepare well to answer questions around
governance, employee engagement and people reskilling in an AI-enabled
organization.
In a market research
commissioned by Infosys, 64% respondents stated that their organization’s
future growth is dependent on large-scale AI adoption, however, only 10% of
them believed that their organization was currently maximizing the benefits of
AI.
Source: AI Maturity Index
study polling 1600 IT and Business Decision Makers across seven countries (USA,
France, Australia, India, UK, Germany, and China) in November 2016.
Based on our experience
with clients and a study of the pioneers, we believe a well-defined AI strategy
must include organization change management as an important mechanism to
prepare managers and employees both at the project level as well as at the
organizational level to unlearn old ways of working and adopt to a more
flexible, collaborative work environment through reskilling and upskilling.
The three key elements to
consider in an organization change management strategy are:
Augment Leadership to
Prepare for Tomorrow’s Management Practices
At the organization level: Every enterprise must develop an AI vision
that its employees and leaders believe in. Leaders will play an important role
in creating the right perception amongst employees about AI. Rather than view
it as a threat, it must be seen as a tool that can amplify human potential.
They also need to relook and redefine corporate ethics and code of conduct in
view of the impact AI has on the various dimensions of an organization that
include process, tools, culture and more. The four key management practices
that the future managers need to adopt are:
- Rely on AI as
their source of truth for insights
- Focus on problem
solving using critical thinking
- Collaborate across diverse networks
- Think like
designers to bring forth workable solutions
At the project level: Design thinking will play a very important role in
bringing experimentation, empathy and in building models in a collaborative
manner, enabling managers to dirty their hands by prototyping solutions that
are built iteratively to discover failures faster in the lifecycle and achieve
success with greater speed.
Empower Employees to Build
Confidence in an AI-powered Enterprise
At the organization level: Employee orientation towards AI initiatives
needs to begin at the ground level. While everyone realizes going the AI way is
the way forward to growth in a digital world, the why and how of an AI strategy
needs to be explicitly explained to everyone in the organization in order to
align their individual activities with the bigger organizational AI
aspirations. This will make employees see value in the work they do in the
digital context. Employees should be encouraged to reflect on, define and build
their future jobs in an AI-enabled organization by choreographing their own
reskilling paths.
At the project level: Adopting a scenario-based approach can build
employee confidence and ease interactions between machines/systems and human
beings besides enabling testing and learning through pilot projects and proof
of concepts.
Redefine Jobs &
Enterprise Architecture to Enable New Forms of Collaboration
At the organization level: AI will flatten the organization and
encourage seamless collaboration across functions where members from different
business units will come together to solve new customer challenges in a
flexible and fluid non-hierarchical set up.
At the project level: New roles that can build, train and interact
with intelligent systems need to be defined. Training employees to take up
these new roles will become an organizational imperative.
The Next Steps
If you are working on AI
projects or considering implementing AI in your organization, prepare yourself
well with the following key steps:
- Define your AI
vision and governance that everyone in the organization believes in
- Revisit the operating models
- Take ethical
considerations prior to starting any AI initiative
- Draw your
HR/recruitment strategy to bring the talent you need for your new AI
environment
