That’s all it took for ChatGPT to gain 100 million users.
It was the fastest user-base adoption in the history of mankind.
The closest thing to it is Instagram (2 ½ years), and TikTok (9 months).
Businesses are scrambling to adopt the powers of AI for their organizations.
Because as it’s clearly turning out, AI is not just a buzzword that’ll fade in a few months. It is already beginning to upend the old orthodoxy—changing how we do business, and appointing the new winners in industries.
If such a technology is so transformative it is said to have caused an existential crisis in Google, shouldn’t your business also be on it?
Yes, and you need to do so…fast. Establish a beachhead before your competitor does. It’s better to be there first and defend your position than come later and be at a natural disadvantage.
That said, here’s how businesses can adapt to a future of AI…very quickly.
#1 Start With Low-Hanging Fruits.
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and everybody will be integrating it into their systems. But the reason for moving quickly on these developments is to establish yourself with “first mover” advantages.
You would want to avail yourself of the efficiencies, cost-savings, productivity and creativity afforded by AI before your competitor does.
And so to do this quickly, you need to turn your sights on “low-hanging fruits.” These would be areas in your business where AI can quickly be integrated.
These areas tend to be:
- the most time-consuming phases in the operation
- those involving repetitive tasks
- points or forks where decisions are made
Get quick wins and prove to the whole organization how AI can make everyone’s lives better.
#2 Look for a vendor.
There are inherent pros and cons to developing AI in-house versus using a third-party provider.
Developing your own AI capabilities is time-consuming and expensive. (Although costs and cycles are coming down.)
Chances are, there are SaaS companies, or even AI start-ups that offer the expertise that you need. Yours is not the first company to have that particular set of problems, challenges and goals—so chances are that the AI solutions have already been developed.
Collaborate, partner or hire these 3rd party businesses to have a turn-key AI solution.
I’m not saying that you don’t develop your own language model trained on your own data, for example. (You’re probably going to have to do it eventually.) But if your goal is to be the first out of the gate, you should harness already-available tools.
#3 Don’t send your guys packing.
AI is loaded with benefits for your business. And It’s very tempting, once you find out what these new AI tools can do, to shed off redundant labour. You might think, “Why should I continue hiring them when AI can do their job at a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost?”
Yes, you will gain savings in the short term, but you will lose team morale. Those who survive the culling wouldn’t exactly be hyped about working for you at all.
Worse, you might even experience resistance from your people. You don’t want AI to have a bad taste in your employees’ mouths since they will probably be working with it for the rest of their professional lives.
What you need to do instead of letting go of people is to utilize your newfangled tools to the fullest. Adjust productivity and creativity expectations and requirements to factor in AI augmentation.
Keep your team intact and encourage them to explore the limits of AI tools.
All hands on deck, and…
#4 Train! Train! Train!
Adopting a new technology requires urgent training.
Ideally, it would be great if this could happen across the board, but if could train just a few then make do with it. (Plan the skill transfer for others later. It’s important to have a core of employees who can run with AI.)
Training could mean you might have to drop some important ongoing projects or shelve them temporarily—especially if that project pertains to the area of your business where you’re embedding the tech. Things will be changing anyway, so instead of continuing with the project or program, it’s better to have it on the back burner.
We want speed. You want this thing to be up and running in the shortest amount of time. So make training a high priority. If you have to make some adjustments in order to make room for AI, then do what is necessary to make that happen.
In the age of AI, timelines are hyper-speed. A week of training is a lifetime. Seriously. If you can make it in a day or two, so much better. That’s the kind of urgency we’re dealing with here.
Quickly train and transfer the learning across the board.
#5 Quickly create new systems and best practices.
Cement your gains and create the “new normal.”
Create a process and system of expectations that take into account the new level of productivity and creativity brought about by AI.
Say you’re a marketing agency. If you have a tool that can create graphics in minutes instead of days, then move your deadlines a bit. Or require more designs. If you used to pitch 3 different versions to clients, make it 5.
If you can create a whole marketing campaign in hours instead of weeks, up the ante and look into more channels, more slogans, more segments etc. That is, use the time saved to iterate and make everything else better.
Let your guys understand that because of these new tools, there are also new expectations.
Write them in a memo or a document everybody can refer to.
#6 Mistakes are normal.
Kudos to you for taking on such a challenging task. So give yourself and your guys some slack if mistakes are made along the way.
Maybe training went slower than you expected. Or maybe the vendor is having trouble with their deliverables.
Mistakes will inevitably be made. After all, we’re dealing with something complex and unpredictable. So instead of being turned off by these, focus on your progress and keep at it.
Nobody has dealt with these innovations before, and truth be told, we are all figuring things out as we go along. (We are still figuring out the rules of this game.)
Right now, speed is at a premium. It could very well be the case that the organization that moves first can win it all. With these 6 tips, your business is poised to quickly take the industry lead in the emerging era of artificial intelligence.
The AI space is ever-evolving. It sure would be nice to have highly-skilled technical people in your team to help your business make sense of the developments and quickly adapt to the situation.
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