Generative AI: From Disruption to Strategy
It’s been eight months since our industry was disrupted by the release of ChatGPT, Midjourney, Bard, and other GenAI tools. Undoubtedly, this is one of the major disruptions we have experienced as of late, which has dramatically impacted our industry and ecosystem.
The effect is so significant that these capabilities have implications in many areas of our work — processes and workflows, new opportunities for creating value for our customers, risks that GenAI poses and more.
Strong companies and clever managers will embrace these capabilities and adjust their work routines, roadmaps, and plans accordingly.
But where should you start?
As always, the answer is strategy.
As I see it, strategy is a structured story that I can pitch and communicate in 1–2 slides. A clear strategy helps simplify both complex and vague notions or concepts and provides a framework for execution. I intentionally mention 1–2 slides because a good strategy should be easy to communicate.
A clear and straightforward strategy enables us to effectively communicate with teams and employees and engage them with this new big thing.
The process of drafting and agreeing on a company’s GenAI strategy provides the opportunity to map, explore, and discuss its different implications and impact on the company and its products.
So, what should your strategy be toward GenAI?
The easy answer is that it depends on the company, product, culture, etc. However, to address this question, I suggest several tips that will help you draft the right strategy.
1. Map the current state of the company and its product
I always rely on the good old SWOT framework — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Start with a SWOT analysis of your company and product that will result in a clear view of your current state, considering internal and external factors.
Then, repeat the process, this time focusing specifically on the potential impact of GenAI on your company and its products. Here are a few examples:
- Strength — The company’s portfolio already has AI-powered products that GenAI capabilities can easily accelerate
- Weakness — Lack of tech-savvy employees may lead to a challenging adoption of GenAI tools
- Opportunity — GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Bard can accelerate productivity
- Threat — Google’s Search Generative Experience may impact main acquisition channel of the company
The practice I’ve described should help align the adoption of GenAI and the company’s vision and general strategy, and answer the vital question: how does integrating GenAI support the company’s broader goals and address existing risks?
2. Encourage bottom-up discovery and early adopters
Give your employees time to explore this new technology along with the new tools and techniques. In this non-binding process, the early adopters will play a significant role in developing ideas for initiatives, products, new features, and workflows that leverage GenAI. Encouraging early adopters to experiment is crucial, as it will help build a group of people that will act as the “change agents,” the advocates of this tool, helping to incorporate it into the company’s workflows and products.
For us, this process resulted in a massive Excel sheet with ideas based on GenAI capabilities. A few of these ideas are the initial use cases we established.
3. Consolidate your findings into a framework
Group bottom-up ideas and top-down opportunities & threats, each serving as a pillar in your strategy. Then prioritize these pillars and describe them. The prioritization should be based on the impact and the correlation with the company’s vision and general strategy. Try not to have more than 4–5 Pillars.
For example, strategic pillars could be around improving company productivity and efficiency, enhancing the value proposition of a core product, or generating new value propositions by solving customer pain points that we weren’t able to solve before.
4. Set goals for each strategic pillar
These goals shouldn’t be too specific or rigid, they should provide a north star for the relevant teams. In order to ensure you’re not building new experiences just because GenAI is cool and trendy, it’s important to think critically when deciding on goals and KPIs.
Ensure you’re providing value for internal stakeholders, the company, or your customers. The north star metric should be relevant to the subject of the pillar, such as productivity & efficiency, retention, acquisition, engagement, etc.
5. Identify initial use cases
Detail 1–2 use cases per strategic pillar to help communicate this framework. Sometimes the titles and the metrics themselves aren’t enough. This is particularly important with a technology concept or a technology-focused strategy.
6. Find a way to illustrate this strategy visually
A visual representation is key when communicating the strategy to your teams and stakeholders, it will help you align on messaging. It’s particularly important when a number of people will communicate this strategy in different forums.
7. Consider ethical & compliance guidelines
GenAI, specifically AI-generated content, goes hand in hand with potential ethical issues. When forming an AI strategy, you should develop guidelines and ethical frameworks for the responsible use of AI within your organization. Ensure that AI-generated content aligns with your company’s values and maintains transparency with users and customers.
To sum it up, I truly believe that all modern organizations, especially in our industry, should be part of this revolution to remain relevant and competitive. A well-defined strategy for adopting and implementing GenAI will make this process more thorough, effective, and will increase your teams and employees’ engagement.
Good luck!
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Thanks to Katie Baskind.
