Embracing the Future with AI
Netcel recently came together for our quarterly all-hands day to explore the future – exploring possibilities, identifying opportunities, tackling challenges, and celebrating teamwork.
The focus for this session was AI – how we can make the most of it for our business, our clients, for us as individuals, and for society as a whole.
We spent the day exploring how AI is likely to impact Netcel and our roles here, how we can make the most of the efficiency gains. We conducted a number of scenario planning and speculative design exercises to explore where AI is likely to bring the greatest beneficial impact across customer experiences, social and community, and where we need to be careful to understand the risks. We learned a lot and had a great time building on and sharing our knowledge and experiences.
It’s an exciting time right now. Understanding new technologies and their impact on the wider world is why many of us chose a career in digital in the first place, and in many ways the advent of wide scale, consumer AI feels like a turning point.
However, like digital, AI wont simply arrive at a single moment, then stop, and make universal sense to everyone. It will emerge, like digital, across many horizons and applications – from financial services to healthcare, in our personal lives and communities. Digital started with the dial up modem, and now is embedded all around us. It is like a rising tide, and we need to understand what kind of boat we need to make the most of it.
An adaptive approach is important. Building the capability to make insight-led decisions to navigate the path through the change, opportunities, disruption and challenges that are ahead. And while AI has been around for several decades, in its current scales consumer form its just getting started - the AI you use today is the worst you will ever use.
So Justin Masters, Netcel’s CTO and I thought we would summarise three take-aways from the day that we felt would be useful to share. It’s a time of opportunity and excitement that needs to be navigated with pragmatism and caution – and we look forward to discovering more in the work we do together with our clients.
- Don't fear the change. Embrace it.
There are undoubtedly ethical, inclusion and data privacy factors to be aware, maybe concerned about. However the purpose of AI is, ultimately, to create efficiency. Sometimes through automation, sometimes through simply faster processing and larger dataset capabilities. The priority for any organisation is to identify the opportunities AI can bring in this context and that's when you can begin an AI journey of true benefit. Get started. - Don't judge AI by what you see today.
There are already some great applications of scales consumer AI but it's not yet at maturity. It's probably a few years away, at the very least, and will only continue to improve. As we have said, the AI you see today is the worst AI you are likely to ever see. We're very much at the beginning of the journey, and, like digital, we will discover all kinds of applications and uses in the future. - If you want to understand the true potential, throw the rulebook out of the window and ask yourselves two questions, "what if" and then "why not".
What if a particular scenario could be addressed through AI, and if so, why not? Disruptive new technologies require a new way of thinking - open your mind and it will help to see the potential and take your thinking well beyond the realms of what's possible or feasible today. If AI is reliant on data, which it is, the data is probably already there, just the algorithms and models aren't there to take advantage of the data - yet.
We are already exploring the potential for AI across a number of our clients. It can appear an uncertain future, and certainly has the potential to be hugely disruptive. Remember we all surfed the digital wave and lived to tell the tale!
More than anything our advice is get started – even if in small ways to discover how AI can work for you. Remember, the market threats haven’t really changed. It’s a case of new tools and technologies disrupting your sector and market, which is part of the natural order of things; and the risk of your competitors using the tools we all have access to, better than you. This is not new.
Everyone is getting started despite how it may appear, and the sooner you get learning, the sooner the training wheels come off.
Dom Graveson, Strategy Director, Netcel
We talk more about AI and other digital technology trends in our report, From Digital Transformation to Digital Evolution and you can also learn more about measurement of digital ROI my latest eBook: A Value First Approach eBook.