Artificial intelligence promises to be one of the most disruptive and transformative forces in the modern world. By the end of 2023, there were more than 30,000 mentions of AI in earnings calls, up from 500 mentions the year before, demonstrating its rapidly increasing prominence.
AI is a tool that most industries are looking to integrate into the way they work. Fifty-five percent of organizations use AI in at least one business unit, up from 20% in 2017. However, mastering the implementation of AI and doing so safely and ethically is paramount. That’s where choosing the right AI tools can be a game changer for your workforce and business.
Director of Solutions Manager and Principal Architect Collaboration, Unisys.
The Key Considerations Leaders Must Answer Before Investing in AI
Not all AI copilots are created equal. With several versions available, it can be difficult to determine which Copilot is best for your organization’s team, whether they’re part of your IT, sales, or marketing departments. For example, Microsoft is proud to position M365 Copilot as “your copilot for work” due to its adherence to AI data standards and its ability to integrate with all of your everyday applications in the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, and Word. As a result, your teams can get consistent access to AI assistance as they weave through a busy day of ever-changing tasks.
It can be difficult for some to distinguish between AI assistants and AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, which uses AI and machine learning technology to generate text-based responses to questions, Copilot is present throughout the workday: assisting with organizational tasks, querying and analyzing data, and integrating with Office applications. Before investing, your organization should create a wish list based on AI business goals and strategies. Relevant considerations include: What’s your end goal? Are there workplace inefficiencies that need to be corrected?
Enterprise-wide adoption can be quite a challenge. Your organization needs to be confident that they can achieve this adoption. To avoid delays or setbacks in implementation, your team needs to be able to demonstrate the value and impact of your adoption. This means having a vision of the time and resources that an AI assistant will save. To do this, you need a strategy that outlines a personalized set of outcomes that show how this surplus time and staff can be better used. The benefits of this reallocation should not be lost or miscommunicated as the message moves up through management, so keep it as simple as possible.
Once you’ve decided to invest, it’s time to deploy your AI assistant to your users. It’s vital to remember that, as with all AI technology, integrating any copilot comes with a number of challenges. Firstly, who gets access? Will it be rolled out randomly to the entire workforce? Or perhaps you’re looking for a specific employee persona that can benefit the most? There are also a few prerequisites that need to be in place before your copilot can be fully integrated. This includes key administrative tasks, such as assigning the correct base license. IT teams also need to ensure that applications are updated across the team structure in advance to support integration and avoid the risk of slowing down the end-user experience.
Firstly, AI governance needs to be up to date. With the first Artificial Regulation Bill released by the EU earlier this year, setting up safe and ethical AI systems within your organisation should be a top priority for your team. Guardrails and legal frameworks need to be followed to ensure a high level of due diligence is introduced and maintained when using this technology. Accountability is key.
Those related to data security are also high on the list of risks to watch out for. Remember that AI-generated information is accessible through sharing data repositories. Within these repositories, leaders must ensure that data is managed appropriately to get the most accurate results. To put it bluntly, ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ means that if you feed your AI legacy or inaccurate data, it will use this to form the basis of the generated work and responses. As a result, users will not get the high-quality response or result they expect, which can create a false preconception about the technology’s capability.
In many workplaces, highly versatile document management solutions like SharePoint, which are valuable as a data repository, have become a “dumping ground” for all types of data due to a “never throw it away” mentality and poor management of data retention. This creates a significant risk to the accuracy of the results and response you would get from an assistant like Copilot, as this is typically one of the primary sources of information that Copilot can pull from.
Finally, organizational change management is paramount when it comes to adopting an AI assistant and defining who will have access to it. As mentioned, not all AI is created equal and organizations must be careful not to choose the wrong AI for the wrong person. This leads to the threat of Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI), where employees use commercial solutions instead of those authorized for the enterprise. While there are undeniable benefits to training your team to deploy your AI assistant to your users, it is time to proactively explore the world of AI and the different solutions available, including a positive impact on return on investment (ROI), using authorized products is considered best practice to prevent data breaches from less reliable technology and protect your corporate IP.
Benefits of Adopting an AI Assistant
Once deployed and used effectively, your team will reap the full benefits of AI. This could look like AI-generated meeting notes through Teams, which can later be developed in Word, with the ability for users to dictate the formatting and writing style based on previous documents. It could look like using an AI like M365 Copilot in Outlook to prioritize and identify specific tasks within hundreds of emails, and generate draft responses to incoming emails. You could even analyze data to create projections and business plans that already outline bottlenecks and successes, for example in sales, where revenue is falling and costs need to be reduced.
Many may be discouraged when they realize that an AI assistant won’t do all of their work. It’s important to remember that with tools like M365 Copilot, this is a copilot, not a pilot, and should be treated as such. It provides a starting point, a way to ease writer’s block, or a helping hand as a digital virtual assistant, so you don’t have to start from scratch or waste valuable time on mundane tasks. This is just the beginning. The future of AI assistance will undoubtedly continue to evolve rapidly in the coming years. By following the steps above, your organization will be well-positioned to deploy AI assistants across all areas of your business.
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