According to a 2017 Deloitte report, “90% feel that cognitive technologies will be somewhat or much more important to their companies’ strategies [in the future] than they are today.” Working with a company that offers cognitive-based technology solutions, I’ve seen this increase in importance firsthand.
The cost of missing out in the cognitive race can adversely impact your business. But the good news is that it’s become much easier to adopt cognitive technology today. The caveat is that lofty hopes, poor planning and inexperience could quickly derail your cognitive initiatives.
Here are some perspectives on creating a systematic strategy to integrate cognitive technologies in your enterprise, set pragmatic expectations and reap maximum return on investment (ROI).
Who Owns It?
Depending on which side of the fence you are on, you might say the onus of cognitive projects lies with IT or business. Well, it’s time to burn the fence. IT and business have a shared responsibility toward crafting and driving the cognitive strategy. Several early adopters are creating new roles, with chief experience officer (CXO) sponsorships, to steward their cognitive initiatives to drive positive business outcomes.
Brace For The Challenges Ahead
Some of the challenges that come with adopting cognitive technologies include:
• Finding The Right Problem To Solve: If you were thinking of using artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate X percentage of your workforce, think again. This scenario is neither real nor ideal—and you will run into massive change management challenges internally. It is widely accepted in the industry today that AI cannot replace humans, not anytime soon at least. A smarter goal would be to minimize employee effort in labor-intensive, repetitive work. Create a transparent AI manifesto, which includes upskilling of employees to cowork effectively with AI.
• Integrating With Existing IT And Business Ecosystems: Integration of cognitive technologies with existing workflows is one of the biggest hurdles that organizations face. Ensure you check the feasibility of this integration and bake that into your strategy.
• Identifying The Right Cognitive Solution: Organizations often lack the understanding of cognitive technologies necessary to identify which solution is right for their needs.
• Finding The Right Partner: Lastly, the steep shortage of talent with technical skills and experience is hurting the cognitive roll-out. However, leading technology service providers have developed strong cognitive competencies that can be leveraged by forging strategic partnerships.
Look Inside And Start
Now that you have some idea of the challenges and the solutions, look inside your organization to start your cognitive journey. Look for projects where big data and analytics have already been leveraged. Chances are, they use some element of AI, even if it’s elementary.