AI: Strategy Before Tactics

Businesses are somewhat in a race right now to see how they can implement and adopt AI in their business. It’s important because AI is an incredible accelerant for businesses and productivity tool. And it’s from a competitive perspective. You have to find how to make that work so that you can keep up with your market. However, there’s a lot of mistakes being made out there in that people are doing before they think about what they’re doing. And when you start with the tactics, you end up in a mess. It’s like when your garage becomes a dumping place, convenient dumping place for this and that, and this and that. Until you can’t park the car there anymore, anymore, your business is at risk of being flooded with conflicting and nonsteady state AI implementations that will confuse your employees, overload them, and do the same for your prospects and your customers.

So you need a strategy before you start deciding on your tactics for AI. Here are a couple of things to think about:

Inside:
On the inside of your company. AI is a powerful productivity tool for you. It accelerates everything it touches. That’s the good and the bad. So while it will help almost immediately in some applications, it also can flood and create confusion, accelerate confusion and misalignment between your employees and totally overlap, load their workload. So some things to think about is you’d create your strategy. Will you constantly be checking to see which LLM is is the best and fastest this month because it changes every month. And you need to build a system that can stand the test of time. So you need to think about how you’re going to select LLMs. Is everybody gonna use the same ones? How will they work together and share progress across their tools? Your employees need digestible adoption of AI. Your processes and your systems have to be constant enough that you can build on them and have them continue to evolve. And you have to adapt to the incredible pace of change in AI and decide how you’re gonna have a steady course through that crazy innovation.

And your employees are going to struggle if you give them too much too soon if you give them the freedom to pile on. A study from Harvard Business Review recently showed that employees that were studied actually had a worse performance, had a worse work environment when AI was added because it was rampant, and it distracted them and brought them into things that weren’t their purview and helped cause them to blur their ability to manage their work life balance.

Outside:
Outside the company, there’s two things to keep in mind. One, the world of the open web is changing because of ai. So your prospects and clients will no longer as directly find you by their choice of what they’ll search for. They’ll be an intermediary AI that will manage and ask, ask its thoughts of what they should be looking for. So there’s a decoupling of that direct link. So you need to keep that in mind in terms of you don’t have as much control as you used to in terms of keywords and how you’re found on the web.

At the same time, the content flood is changing your prospects and your partner’s openness to getting information from you. The worst thing you can do for your clients is flood them with more content. And it’s so tempting, right? Because AI can help you create whatever you want to create. So what you need to think about with your strategy for AI on the outside of your business is how do we show up as genuine and human and responsive, even though in the back we’re leveraging the productivity of AI to do that more effectively? The answer isn’t more, the answer is better and more authentic and struggling with that will give you a leg up on those companies that aren’t thinking about this strategy and are just turning up the volume on their output.

Be the Boss:
So if I had to summarize this in one phrase, it’s be in charge of your ai. Be the boss. Don’t let AI lead you passively. It may feel passive, but you’ll find yourself in a place where you don’t know who you are, your business. Your employees don’t know what happened to their time and your customers are, are, have lost interest in you because you’re approaching them artificially. So take charge, be the boss, and you’ll have a step above most of your competitors.