Russ Kennedy is Chief Product Officer at Nasuni.
The amount of AI washing happening in the enterprise world is maddening. Walk through any airport today and the ads would leave you convinced every company on the planet is now an AI leader.
On top of all this marketing misdirection, we’re overwhelmed by legitimate AI news. The actual AI leaders are releasing new models weekly. It’s hard enough to keep up with what Microsoft or Google alone are doing, let alone every other major and minor player. Finding the signals in all this noise is exhausting.
The temptation is to ignore it all and focus entirely on the traditional problems and challenges your business faces. Yet giving in to AI fatigue is a bad idea for your organization. There are too many opportunities. You are going to fall behind if you don’t advance the use of AI within your enterprise.
Here are five suggestions for overcoming AI fatigue and making real, measurable progress:
Own the strategy.
In a recent study, Gartner found that 13% of CEOs are driving their organization’s generative AI strategy.
On some level, this makes perfect sense. These are very technical tools, so the inclination is to leave it to the technical leaders to figure out how to deploy them. But, to me, this is a missed opportunity. That same Gartner report found that 44% of CEOs had used ChatGPT in the first half of 2023. Furthermore, they’d used it in their jobs, not just while helping their kids with homework.
This disparity is striking. If you have experimented with these tools, you know how powerful they can be, so you shouldn’t be sitting in the back seat. You should be demonstrating their productive potential yourself and leading your organization’s adoption. Furthermore, you should assume an active role in shaping your organization’s AI strategy.
Thankfully, the first step is simple.
Ditch the blanket.
Many companies have instituted blanket bans on AI tools within their organization for security reasons.
Based on what I’ve learned in working with enterprises—and my experience with my own company—I’d bet that if you anonymously polled your employees, somewhere around 90% of your people would admit to using AI. Your people are already using these tools. Banning AI is only going to encourage shadow IT.
With a blanket ban, you also lose out on the chance to understand how AI might help your organization in surprising or unexpected ways. You make it taboo for people to inform their colleagues about these small wins and how a product might be useful in accomplishing some mundane or time-consuming task.
Those productivity gains will never spread if they are a secret.
Build a sandbox.
The urge to ban made sense at the start. We didn’t know enough about how AI tools worked. But today it is possible to deploy officially sanctioned and security-corralled AI tools with the appropriate governance and controls. So, I’d suggest picking a few tools, getting your security leaders to put the proper wrappers around them, configuring the models so they can’t train on your data and then encouraging widespread use.
By building a secure, enterprise-approved sandbox, you can let your employees experiment and uncover those benefits and gains. Plus, you will be able to retain any related IP inside the business. Let’s say one of your employees wants to explore a subject relating to a customer’s business. If you have a blanket ban on AI, she might slip outside the corporate network and interact with an LLM, asking questions and bouncing around ideas as she would with a colleague. Once she’s done, however, those ideas are not your organization’s property. You lose the institutional learning associated with the study.
But if you’ve sanctioned AI apps, then all that back and forth becomes IP retained within the business. She could add colleagues to the brainstorming session as well. These rich interactions become company property that other employees can access and build on.
Demand real results.
As more employees test and experiment with approved tools, you should have a plan in place to track and measure the results. A level of play should be encouraged, but it should all be focused on productivity and real, measurable gains. Institutionalize regular check-ins and reports to capture anecdotal feedback, too. You should work to understand how people feel these tools are impacting their daily work and interactions with colleagues.
You’re not running an AI-washing marketing campaign. Your goal is to find out what actually works for your business. If something isn’t making a positive impact after a predetermined time, move on. Pour your efforts and resources into another AI service or tool instead.
Track AI with AI.
Finally, at a high level, you do need to track what is happening out there in the world of AI development because the space is moving so fast. A new tool might emerge that is perfectly suited to the needs of your organization.
The waterfall of information can be completely overwhelming, so I’d suggest using AI itself to monitor these developments. If someone suggests an interesting podcast or video lecture on new trends or tools, consider letting an AI tool summarize the content for you to save yourself time. Subscribing to a few short, digestible, AI-focused newsletters is advisable, too.
Believe me, I understand the fatigue, but this technology will drastically impact your organization. Exactly how it will do so may still be unclear, but if you suppress the urge to pull back and instead take an active role in driving your organization’s strategy, both you and your business will be in a much better position to succeed in the years ahead.
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