What Does AI Have to Do with Strategy?

As you would expect at a consulting firm, we get a lot of questions on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Of course, Perficient provides a wide range of services around these types of capabilities. All too often, companies seem to appoint someone to a position with AI in the title and call it good. That person then takes an approach that worked well for previous generations of technology…they looked at platforms and headed down the path of selecting the “right” tool.

That approach worked well when you wanted an integration platform, enterprise search engine, intranet portal, or other slot type technologies that fit in some very specific use cases.  That approach fails to work with AI and Machine learning even though you can take a platform approach. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google would love to sell you on those types of platforms.

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Ultimately though, you have to ask yourself, what is the promise of AI and machine learning? I would state that this is a transformational set of technologies which make your business better and more efficient. It can be applied in numerous areas throughout your business. But you can’t gain the most value without asking a few questions which will guide the application of it:

1. What is AI and machine learning?  What do they do? What promise do they hold?
2. What is my company and even division strategy?  How will we win in the marketplace?  (You may think this a dumb question but ask the next five colleagues you meet about your companies strategy and when they tell you they don’t know, well, you have an answer)
3. How can AI and machine learning help us do better at our strategy?  How will they better differentiate us?
4. What specific areas hold the most promise?

I ask these questions because you don’t transform without first aligning the possibility for change to the areas that would benefit the most from change.

Bottom Line

So yes, AI and machine learning have a lot to do with your business strategy. When aligned correctly to your needs, they hold great promise. You just need to think of them a little differently than a simple widget you plugin somewhere.