Imagining the enterprise: look through both lenses of your AI goggles

Photo credit: Bram van Oost via Unsplash

You’re looking at the problem wrong.

This is one of the perennial laments of technologists, particularly enterprise architects, when they work with leaders who claim to want to transform their business. Somebody senior, such as the Chief Operating Officer, or the person who runs all of the call centres, will invite the technologists in, and say that they want to fundamentally reimagine the way their business works. Yet, when the technologists start to produce designs and make proposals, it turns out that they have a rather different understanding of what fundamental means.

The technologist suggests, for example, that a whole category of work carried out in the back office could be avoided by fixing the experience earlier in the value chain: if customers were helped to express their needs more easily, and if the front-end could find a product that fit those needs better, then the back-office would have to spend less time fixing errors and resolving complaints. But the business sponsor shakes their head: they are nervous about making a change that goes outside their remit. They ask the technologists to focus on optimising the work that makes it into their business unit, and to stop worrying about how the work gets there in the first place.

As a result, powerful digital technology which has the potential to reshape business processes and customer experience is used to make basic time and motion improvements reminiscent of those from another era, where moving the in-tray one metre to the left would reduce the handling of inbound paper by one second per item.

It is tempting for the technologists to scream in frustration that their sponsors are looking at the problem wrong: if their sponsors were able to see their business with the same insight that they have, they would not tune the existing model, but would create a new model. This scream is usually silent.

Guess what is about to happen with AI.

Despite the claim that ‘AI is already reshaping industries’ the number of industries which have genuinely been reshaped by AI remains low. Most organisations are still tentatively letting AI penetrate their operations, either through structured programmes, or organically, as enthusiasts adopt and deploy tools. Most are still optimising locally: doing the AI equivalent of automating the inefficient back-office process, of moving the in-tray.

Just as with more traditional business transformation, leaders that truly use this new wave of technology to transform their businesses will be those who learn to put on their ‘AI goggles’, those who can look at the structure and nature of their work, and see what is amenable to being automated, assisted or augmented with AI.

Note that a good pair of AI goggles does not simply wash everything with a rosy AI glow (except, perhaps for the sake of the marketing department). It is a rather more fine-grained instrument, which helps leaders determine where AI is a good fit for their business, where it is a bad fit, and all the places where more established technologies will do a better job.  (For example, asking an LLM to calculate the interest on a loan makes as little sense as asking a human to do it - this is a job for efficient, reliable, well-tested procedural software.)

Furthermore, a good pair of AI goggles has two lenses. Many leaders only look through the first lens: the lens that tells them how much more efficient and effective their business could be. Mature enterprise AI leaders will look through the second lens too: the lens that shows them everything that must be in place to run a responsible, reliable, stable and cost-effective business enabled by AI.

This is the lens that shows, just as with traditional computing technology, power does not come for free. Even when everything is delivered as a service, leaders still need to care about the grimy engine rooms of their businesses: the processes, skills and people who exert control, who stop broken things going into production, and who fix running things when they break. The financial models which optimise your AI consumption, and cater for shifts in the market. The procedures which make sure that you are treating your customers and your staff fairly.

The first lens tells you what your business could be with AI. The second lens tells you how your business needs to operate to be successful and responsible with AI. Enterprise AI leaders need to look through both.