This week, I gave a talk in Manchester to a group of business owners and leaders, focusing on my signature talk, AI in Action.

We had a relatively small group, with each person at a different stage of maturity when it came to their AI journey. That is always a challenge, but it is a challenge I relish and enjoy.

I was delighted to receive a 93% feedback score for the talk, which was fantastic, and I am glad that it resonated with the group.

The five sections of the talk

  1. How AI is impacting things. We look at some statistics, really just to make sure that everybody in the room is on board with the fact that this is not a trend or a fad. It is something that is going to have a significant and wide-reaching impact on pretty much every sector, particularly knowledge-based work.
  2. Inside looking in. We look at the business from its own perspective, how it can use AI within its service delivery, and what sort of useful tools, options and ideas are available.
  3. Outside looking in. We explore how AI is changing the way customers find businesses through search. This is a big topic that we focus on through Sleeping Giant Media.
  4. The AI audit. Each of the members receives an AI audit as part of the session, where we explore what is working, what is not working and where some of the opportunities might be.
  5. Implementing AI in your organisation. The final section looks at how businesses can begin implementing AI within their organisation and what some of the practical considerations might be.

Is AI equally important for every industry?

Some of the questions raised during the session focused particularly on whether AI is equally important for every industry.

I think the key thing here is that, although Sleeping Giant Media and probably the wider agency space have to be ahead of the game, that does not necessarily apply to everybody.

AI is fundamental to how we work because we are heavily technology and knowledge-based. Other sectors will naturally be further behind. The challenge is that they will inevitably begin to catch up.

The risk to established businesses is not necessarily the other large organisations that have been around for a long time. It is potentially the smaller organisations that are low on overheads and technology-enabled from the beginning.

The cloud lesson

It is similar to where I was with Ant, my business partner, when we started the business 20 years ago from our dining room.

I use the example in the session that, when we started the business, we were cloud-based. That just made sense. We stored our files online, which allowed for instant collaboration and sharing. We did not have any legacy systems that we needed to think about.

For almost the first five years of us operating the business, I remember the conversation in the wider business world being focused heavily on the idea that companies needed to move to the cloud. To be honest, I remember having to Google it because I did not really understand what people were talking about initially.

I then discovered that we were already, by definition, in the cloud. It had never even been a conversation for us because it was simply how we had started the business.

I think AI falls into the same category. Businesses starting today will be AI-enabled from the beginning. It will not even be a consideration. It will simply be how they operate.

For more established businesses, the challenge is working out how to retrospectively introduce AI into existing systems, processes and toolsets. I think that is going to be difficult for many organisations.

If you started your business again today

One of the things I push the team to consider is this:

If you started your business again today, what would you do, and how would you do it?

Rather than only looking at how to retrofit AI into what you already do, think about what you would do if you were not constrained by your current systems. What would you build from the beginning?

That does not necessarily mean ripping up everything you already have. Established businesses have the advantages of market share, brand awareness, an existing client base and existing revenue. I am not suggesting that they should simply start again.

However, from a mindset perspective, I think it is worth exploring the idea. It enables you to think without being constrained by what you currently do.

Some of the most dangerous thinking I see in businesses is:

“We do it this way because we have always done it that way.”

That is a real blocker to innovation.

AI needs innovation, but it is not the whole answer

AI needs innovation, but AI itself is not the complete solution. There are some fantastic tools available, but they cannot do everything.

What AI cannot do is understand your business in the way that you do. It cannot understand your market as well as you can. The opportunity is to combine your skills, knowledge and understanding of the business with AI to drive a better outcome, without being constrained by the limitations of what you already have as an organisation.

I thought this was a fascinating conversation to explore during the session and something that a lot of businesses do not spend enough time considering.

My recommendation, as always, is to explore it. Try to unbind your thinking and separate what you currently do from what you potentially should be doing.

Eventually, you can meet in the middle. You can bring everybody on the journey, embed AI into existing systems where it makes sense, or potentially change those systems completely and bypass some of the inefficiencies they have created.

Thanks to everybody who attended the session. It was a great group and, once again, the conversations made me think about the topic slightly differently. That is something I absolutely love about speaking on AI.

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