Solve Your Most Pressing AI Challenges to Maximize Your ROI

By Joseph Ours, Centric Consulting Director, AI Strategy and Modern Software Delivery

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption offers transformative potential but faces common challenges, such as governance, data readiness, and prioritizing AI projects. We explain in this blog.

AI tools and capabilities are rapidly evolving and will transform your organization, no matter your industry. Like any journey, the path to AI adoption is bound to have its obstacles. There isn’t a single universal barrier to adoption — it will depend on where your organization is on its journey. But our experts expect business leaders to face several common challenges along the way.

Challenge 1: Governance

In Deloitte’s “State of Generative AI in the Enterprise” quarter one report in January 2024, 41% of leaders said their organizations were underprepared — or worse, not at all prepared — to address governance related to generative AI adoption.

To use AI safely and effectively at scale, your organization needs to have robust governance frameworks in place. This includes determining how to control the sprawl of AI tools and ensuring model effectiveness beyond initial validation. You’ll also need to manage corporate risk when you use AI for critical decisions and adapt to a changing regulatory landscape.

It’s one thing to use AI at an individual level. But it can quickly get complicated when AI starts authenticating people, like through facial recognition for financial transaction validation, or when it is used to make decisions, like whether to approve a mortgage request. Without corporate risk management and governance, your organization risks serious potential problems.

Challenge 2: Data Readiness

High-quality, accessible data is the foundation for effective AI. Most organizations, though, lack truly AI-ready data. It’s incomplete, outdated, or not properly structured and managed. In fact, in a recently released Informatica report, “CDO Insights 2024: Charting a Course to AI Readiness,” 42% of data leaders said data quality was their main obstacle to AI adoption.

Another potential barrier is that many organizations don’t account for “classification by compilation.” If AI joins data together in a way that makes things identifiable, like accidentally making combinations of data personally identifiable, that data must be protected as personally identifiable information. If the data is not properly protected, your organization could face legal, reputational, and other repercussions.

Finally, most organizations don’t have nonoperational data available. In fact, companies often use a data broker type of service, whether they realize it or not. Consider creating a management plan for your organization’s data, assigning value to the data, and understanding how it’s shared throughout your organization.

Challenge 3: Prioritizing AI

Deploying AI is not a simple or cheap endeavor. To maximize your investment, your organization must carefully determine which use cases will provide the greatest business value and have the best chance of success.

If you fail to prioritize your AI projects and tools effectively, you’ll see an increase in operational costs, along with underused and underperforming AI models. Remember, not every model you explore will be fruitful. You need to wisely manage the costs of your model development to return value.

Take a Phased Approach to AI Adoption

Remember, AI adoption is not a sprint — it’s a marathon. While the timelines can vary, taking a phased, strategic approach to address these common stumbling blocks in AI adoption can help put your organization on the path to AI maturity and sustained value creation.

Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business.