How to Ensure Your New GenAI Strategy Sticks
Imagine this. You’ve just received an email fromyour Head of Procurement saying the new GenAI tool you requested for your team has been approved. Elated, you can’t wait to get started, as thoughts of the promised benefits of this new tool dance through your head. You move smoothly through the remainderof your company’s procurement process, and swiftly introduce the tool to your team. Everyone greets the idea of using GenAI with enthusiasm and are excited to start exploring how to put it to full use to increase productivity in their daily workflow. Satisfied, you sit back and wait for the improvements to start rolling in.
However, the changes you had hoped for are not as quick to surface as you had expected, as a month goes by without significant engagement with the tool. Thinking it’s just a matter of time, you remind your team of the fantastic new GenAI tool at their fingertips, and hope that they just needed a little nudge to get started. Much to your dismay, the months continue to fly by, and the once promising GenAI tool now sits gathering digital dust.
Despite the benefits GenAI promised to bring to your team and everyone’s initial excitement to use it, all the glitter and gold has fallen flat, leaving you questioning what could have possibly gone wrong.
However mysterious the downfall of your promising GenAI tool may feel, the explanation is actually quite simple. Your adoption strategy wasn’t sticky enough.
Designing Adoption Strategies for Success
By sticky, I don’t mean covered in melted caramel like the hands of a toddler.
When it comes to adopting GenAI, you need a robust strategy for adoption that focuses on making the new tool ‘stick’ to your team’s daily workflow. GenAI is not like other software that you can plug and play into your existing operations. Instead, these tools challenge us to reinvent how we approach our work by fundamentally changing the way we consume, evaluate, and apply information. In order to take full advantage of the benefits GenAI promises to bring, you need an adoption strategy that reflects the potential depth of advancement you are setting out to achieve.
Without a sticky strategy in place, the story from above will be your best-case scenario. Your worst case in failed GenAI adoption in enterprise is not that nobody uses the tool, but that the tool does get used in a bad way — causing an adverse impact (at scale) for both you and your customers. There is a lot your company can stand to gain with GenAI, but for every potential benefit, there is an unintended consequence lurking around the corner that needs to be properly addressed.
So what makes a GenAI adoption strategy sticky? It boils down to two main factors: how holistic your strategy is, and what values it’s based on.
Building For a Full Picture
Let’s start with the first factor: making your adoption strategy holistic. One of the biggest blockers to success in GenAI, and truly AI in general, is when business leaders approach this opportunity as solely a technical initiative. What I mean by this is that there is a tendency to be blinded by the shine of a new technical tool and fall victim to the thinking that it can be deployed like a magic wand: one wave of the new GenAI tool — and poof! — all your problems are magically fixed!
Obviously, this magic wand way of thinking is far from the reality of how GenAI actually works. But why is this? When it comes to GenAI, we have to recognise that these are not tools in a vacuum, but instead are tools being introduced into an already vibrant ecosystem. The people who will be using the tools, and the processes for how they will be encouraged or even expected to use them play just as much, if not more, of an important role in the success of GenAI than the tool itself. Think of it this way, if you were handed a shiny new tool but weren’t trained in how it works or given directions for when to use it, how likely would you be to actually do anything with it? My guess is not very likely.
What this means is that your GenAI adoption strategy needs to include three layers: people, process, and technology. By including all three layers to your strategy, you are setting yourself up for sticky success by holistically incorporating GenAI into your preexisting structures.
Creating Clarity in the Confusion
While a holistic strategy will support the use of your new tool, how do you ensure that it will be used in alignment with your business to promote your company’s mission and objectives? This is where the second factor for GenAI success comes in: designing a values-based adoption strategy.
GenAI adoption can feel like the Wild West, there’s plenty of open space opportunity to explore but very little law governing how to best go about that exploration. This lack of guidelines and best practices creates a general state of confusion and uncertainty as it can be difficult to determine what direction will lead you to success.
However, there is a clear answer to this confusion, and it lies in the values of your company. Think of your company mission as your end destination, it’s the goal everyone is working towards achieving no matter their role or responsibility. To reach that objective, you will need directions and guidance to keep you in alignment with the end goal. Values provide that clear direction, guiding key decisions so that they promote your company mission.
Translating those values into the adoption strategy for your new GenAI tool guarantees that the use of this tool will be in alignment with your company’s mission and objectives, instead of working counter to what you are trying to achieve. In other words, values clear the confusion on GenAI and create a comprehensive path forward even in the most complex of scenarios. Combine your values with a holistic approach to your GenAI adoption strategy, and you are building for sticky success straight from the start.
Olivia Gambelin is an AI Ethicist, her book Responsible AI is a guide to how business leaders can develop and implement a robust and responsible AI strategy for their organisations and is out now.