Business Rewired

Answers to a common question

One of the most common questions I get these days from my clients and audiences goes something like this: “How do I prepare my company for the age of AI?”  This might just be the question of our age.  Beware of a lot of junk advice that I’ve seen.

So you are a part of a good company.  It performs well, it generates healthy EBITDA for the owners.  Your data house is in order, but your firm is fairly conventional in the way that it uses technology.  You have this unsettling feeling that the company could be completely left behind as AI makes its way into businesses of all kinds.  You have an urge to do something—but what is that?  Company leadership is sour on expensive “science projects” that don’t produce immediate results.  

A good way to think about an AI-dominated future is to imagine a world where you have an army of free, bright, but inexperienced interns constantly roaming the company ready to be directed to do important tasks at your behest.  Now, what is the hardest thing about working with new interns?  It is teaching them how things work at the company, and where to find information that they need to do their assigned tasks.   Wouldn’t it be nice if there were file cabinets with clear labels like “Pricing info here” or “Operations Processes inside” or “Here’s how we sell”.  Just point the interns to the rows and rows of file cabinets and they will dutifully find everything they need to know.  

This is the key to preparing your firms for the AI generation.  Make your companies computable.  By that I mean create systems that allow AI to understand anything it needs to know in order to accomplish the many tasks that you will eventually ask it to do.  In other words, build information systems that perform services to answer any conceivable question about the firm.  Many years ago we called these IT structures Service Oriented Architecture whereby a piece of software “middleware” directed a programmed query to the just-right location to deliver the data back to the requester.   If you wire your companies in this way, you will make the pathway for AI very straightforward.  Such a re-wiring does not have to be a lengthy or expensive process, and, in fact, it is likely many of you already have this type of capability 90% of the way there. 

Once your company is wired in this way, the AI sits on top of all of these programmatic services and simply uses them as it needs to accomplish any arbitrary task.   

Here’s an experiment that you can run that will help you along the way.  Think of a strategic task that an intern might do.  For one client I had recently, they imagined that the fake intern could perfectly forecast next quarter’s production given current inventories and sales projections.  That in turn prompted the need to gather several key pieces of information from the company—information that was fairly standard yet was not in a format that was easy for anyone (especially not a computer program) to obtain.  Leadership was shocked to learn that something so basic was so hard to get to.  This exercise prompted all sorts of new thinking about how to make the company more easily “computable”.  

Try this in your company.  Like our client, this will reveal all sorts of ways that you can lay the groundwork for AI to more seamlessly enter in and integrate with important functions in the firm.  

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