Greatest Hits #5 - Lessons From the Front Line of AI Implementation

Piers Linney (0:00)

Welcome to the Implement AI Podcast, where we explore how AI is transforming businesses in the real world. At Implement AI, we help organizations move beyond AI experimentation to put AI to work. Through our iOS platform and teams of AI workers, we've deployed hundreds of AI agents across multiple sectors, helping businesses drive revenue, increase capacity, improve customer experiences, and get more done without growing their headcount. Each week on the podcast, we share practical insights from the front line of AI implementation, cutting through the hides to discuss what is actually working, where businesses are seeing real value and what the future of what it looks like as human team and AI workers operate side by side. Let's get into today's conversation.

Organizations, they struggle to move very, very quickly.

The point is, are you finding that this speed to scale is there? What we find is organizations, they don't really know where to start. That's the first thing. Then when they do start, they often pick the wrong use case. One we find there, which in your report, you talked about, it can't just be about efficiency. What we tend to focus on is, it's actually revenues now, Aalok.

Aalok Shukla (1:19)

Yeah, either like revenue or it's like some customer support capacity or some issue like this. But the key thing that we're always trying to look at is like, how do you just drive your P&L to be better basically, right? Where is the underutilized value? Where are the inactive customers?

Piers Linney (1:35)

So quite a bit of research saying that 90 percent of AI projects fail, and I think there's lots of reasons for that often. They don't really know what the end game is, what the objective is, but you find that quite a lot.

And do you think that in the enterprise space, that are they seeing this as a strategic sort of imperative? Is it something they have to do? Or is it like digital transformation? You could do it now or next year, or is something they feel that is a huge capacitive disadvantage, not to do something?

SPEAKER_3 (2:02)

I think there's so much activity, there's so much change, there's so much going on in the markets that it is impossible to ignore. And so I think everyone is feeling the imperative to move and to make sure they're moving quickly.

Then it's about where are you going to drive impact most quickly? And have you got the skills and capabilities in your team to do that? But bear in mind, a lot of sectors are regulated. And so they also have to think about the risk of moving too fast and not having all the right guardrails. They have to think about the reputational risk and the operational risk of moving and doing something with AI now and of standing still, by the way, because both offer different sets of risks. Third, you cannot deploy tech just to drive efficiency. It's got to drive efficiency and it's got to power continuous innovation. To start to think of it as more of an engine to drive that efficient organization. Fourth, it's quarterly.

No one's going to wait 12 months, two years for a big transformation program. Board isn't going to wait.

CEO isn't going to wait and nor is your industry standing still. Again, away from the incremental, be in bolder in terms of how do you drive disruption. But the final point which I really, really like is speed equals strategy. In that scenario, how do you execute faster than the competition? That becomes a real challenge because most organizations are not that used to moving fast. They've been built for a different era and so you're looking at how do you really rebuild your organization to move at the pace of AI.

Piers Linney (4:09)

If you think that deploying AI agents is a project, you're mistaken. This is going to be, first of all, the senior leadership, your job forever.

Aalok Shukla (4:16)

It's just basically a different capacity of workforce.

Piers Linney (4:18)

Every company is going to have a human workforce and an AI workforce.

Aalok Shukla (4:22)

One business we found out that they had 750 inquiries, which had never been replied to. They've been filed as complete in the inbox, basically saying complete and they were never replied to basically.

Piers Linney (4:33)

What was that? Is that because a salesperson just did that to reduce the work, and make it look like they've done the work they hadn't? You'll get a lot of sales opportunities. You try and get a few of them during the week, and then over the weekend or whatever period it is, more build up.