Op/ed: An AI Checklist for Leaders

Chatbots with human-like conversational abilities and other major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are shining a spotlight on companies’ need to incorporate this powerful—and potentially profitable—technology into their business models and strategies.

But where to begin? In a new essay in The Baltimore Sun, University of Maryland management science Professor G. Anand Anandalingam and Alwin Magimay, global head of AI for PA Consulting in London, lay out a series of suggestions for how CEOs and other leaders can begin integrating AI into their daily operations.

Begin by adopting an “AI first” mindset. Adapt your organizational structure to the reality that “intelligence” increasingly resides in many parts of the company. It further means nurturing and investing in talent accordingly and being cognizant of the regulatory and compliance pressures.

Also, think of Intelligent Enterprise as an augmented organization where AI and humans are complementary while adapting to the surroundings and competitive atmosphere. It’s forward-looking. It’s able to both exploit its current competitive advantages and explore and experiment with new innovations and ideas that emerge from its workforce. Good examples include the Ocado Smart Platform, an “end-to-end e-commerce, fulfillment and logistics platform” for grocers from the British online supermarket and tech company, and Netflix’s leveraging AI to analyze data on viewer preferences and behavior. This has informed decisions about what types of content to produce and how to market it and has yielded hit series like “House of Cards.”

Read the rest—and the authors’ eight-point checklist for integrating AI into companies—in The Baltimore Sun.