How you interact with clients and other third parties – Have you engaged in GenAI-related conversations? What will the impact of AI be on your business relationships? How will you double down on what others value most? How will you know what use they are making of GenAI within their own organizations? What are they doing with your data? What do they expect you to do with theirs?
With the pace of change, what is true today is not true tomorrow. Make sure to stay informed about:
The law – What rules and regulations apply to your industry? Consider what is in force now, but also what is likely coming down the pike.
Tools and their functionality – What are the foundational models, general purpose tools, and tools with use cases specific to your industry? What is coming next? How are you monitoring developments? Who is responsible for staying up to date within your organization?
Tech industry developments – What is happening in the tech industry that may impact where development is headed? How can you remain aware of it and plan accordingly?
What you offer – Will GenAI impact your products or service offerings? If so, how? Will it allow you to diversify your offerings? What will the impact of GenAI be on your delivery model?
How you offer it – What impact can you expect on your future operating model? What could be the impact on your culture?
Data – Is your data AI-ready (reliable, up to date, complete, etc.)? What are you doing to build a data culture?
Diversity of perspective – How will you consider GenAI from multiple lenses? How will you encourage diverse perspectives? Remember, fostering innovation relies on vibrant debate, new angles, critical thought, and creativity.
Education and participation – How will you educate your teams? How will you encourage them to participate in vibrant discussions about AI in the context of their areas of expertise? How can they help shape your organization’s path forward? And the path forward of their customers or communities?
Policies – Do you have a policy to guide your teams on prohibited uses and sample responsible uses? Do your policies coalesce with other related policies within your organization? Do you have a mechanism to monitor compliance? What about to ensure your policies stay current over time?
Strategy – What is your strategy regarding GenAI? How will you animate your guiding principles with concrete actions to deliver value? Is your strategy sufficiently anchored to your core business? What needs to happen, to stop happening, or both, to deliver on your strategy?
Governance – Who is responsible for AI in your organization? Do you have agreed areas of accountability to ensure agility and timely decisions? Do you have agreed guiding principles?
Just starting out? Get tactical about what follows.
5.
Potential impacts — of many varieties — in using GenAI are meant to be considered holistically, and in the context of your own business. Think of impacts on:
Explore GenAI with a clear sense of purpose; begin with defining that purpose, then expand your reflections.
ROI – What will the return be? Again, how will you measure success? What will you do with any increase in revenue? What will ensure the containment of cost?
Purpose – What are your competitive aspirations with GenAI? What business advantage are you trying to gain? What can you embed widely? How will you measure success?
Use cases – What problems are most worth solving through AI? What opportunities are most worth seizing with it?
Safety – Can teams experiment with the tools without compromising the safety and security of your company, including its IT infrastructure and data? What about the data of your customers and clients?
Pilot projects – Who needs to be involved for these to succeed? What needs to be done to get meaningful feedback on the utility of the tools? How will you support participants? What cautions, restrictions, parameters, and guidelines must be in place to support your pilot? What other projects need to make room for GenAI not to cause project fatigue?
Business transformation – What will need to change in the way work gets done to leverage GenAI in your business? What else will you need to do to align GenAI to your operating model? And to align your operating model to GenAI?
Be thoughtful — and perhaps reach out to BLG — in exploring risks related to:
Parameters related to using the tools – How are you educating your teams on the use they can make of the tools? What data can they safely input? What questions can they ask? In what areas of expertise? How will you ensure they remain in the loop and responsible for their work? How will they vet and validate outputs? What distinctions need to be made for fresh-out-of-the-box public models, models in pilot, and trained models that you have deployed widely in your organization?
The evolving legal landscape – Do you have the governance framework in place to support AI guiding principles, for instance those listed in Canada’s not-yet-in-force Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA)? Or, is your company doing business in the EU? Remember, the recently enacted EU Artificial Intelligence Act has extraterritorial reach and may impact your company. How are you aligning with principles related to human oversight? Transparency? Fairness and equity? Safety? Accountability? Validity and robustness?
Vendor assessments – Are you experimenting with tools from reputable vendors? Even if the tools work, will they be useful? Have you performed relevant IT security reviews? Are the vendors minded to ensuring security and safeguarding your data?
Vendor contracts – Are the contracts governing the tools fit for purpose? Do you have sufficient service-level agreements? Are there assurances that your data is not shared or used to train a GenAI model? Where and how will your data be processed? Will the vendors keep you informed of new developments in their tools? Will you have an option to opt out if a new feature does not meet your business requirements? Is the dataset that the tool has been trained on reliable for your use cases? Is the data kept up to date and authoritative? Who is responsible in a case of copyright infringement? What use can you make of the outputs?
Risk assessment
1.
Stage setting
2.
Strategic monitoring
3.
Impact prediction
4.
Thoughtful experimentation
Stage setting
1.
Stage setting
2.
Strategic monitoring
3.
Impact prediction
4.
Thoughtful experimentation