To thrive in the age of AI requires the transformation of business processes in ways that open them up to take full advantage of AI.
Just as you can lead a man to water but not make him drink, you can give a business AI tools but not actually make them an effective part of business processes.
Indeed, in my experience helping organizations to modernize their IT infrastructures and environments, failure to integrate AI successfully into the processes that power everyday business operations is one of the major factors that lead to lackluster return on AI investments. If organizations want to leverage AI successfully, they need to bring their business processes up to speed with AI technology.
Here’s why this type of change is so important, along with actionable tips on how organizations can adapt business processes to align with AI.
Why AI innovation requires business process transformation
The story that is playing out as many companies struggle to fit AI within existing business processes is not new. We’ve encountered similar trends whenever disruptive new technologies emerge. The cloud, mobile computing, and big data all prompted similar challenges in past decades.
At the heart of the issue is that creating real value through technological innovation requires a commitment to the transformation of business processes in addition to the deployment of new technology. This means modifying the way workers perform tasks, rethinking expectations surrounding those tasks, and investing in new safeguards to mitigate novel risks that emerge in the context of those tasks.
For instance, take the example of mobile computing, which first started to become commonplace in the enterprise. To leverage value from this technology, businesses needed to do more than just give employees smartphones and tablets. They also needed to change expectations surrounding employees’ ability to perform tasks remotely since mobile technology gave them much more flexibility in this regard. They had to build new security controls into many of their processes to mitigate the novel risks that arise when workers log in from remote devices using third-party networks. They had to enhance their data practices strategies to store and secure mobile data properly. And so on.
AI poses a similar set of challenges. For instance, consider the process of finding information within a corporate knowledge base. When employees use AI-powered tools (as opposed to traditional search engines) for this purpose, new risks emerge – such as the possibility that an AI tool will expose information that shouldn’t be available to certain employees. Mitigating these risks requires building new types of security controls into the process.
This is just one basic example, but you get the point: When AI (or any major new type of technology) enters the business, processes need to evolve, lest the company end up with an expensive new investment that adds little value – or, even worse, creates new risks that the business fails to mitigate.
See also: How to Ensure You Get the Most from Intelligent Process Automation
Steps for adapting business processes for the AI era
Transforming business processes to take full advantage of AI takes work, but it’s a feasible exercise. I recommend approaching it based on the following four steps.
1. Identify processes impacted by AI
First, businesses must determine precisely which of their existing processes need to change as a result of AI investments. This is important because you can’t make the right transformation without first knowing what to transform.
In some organizations, AI may impact virtually every process. But, those that have deployed AI on a more limited scale, or only for certain use cases, may find that it has implications only for a handful of their processes. To determine which ones are affected at your company, inventory your current processes and evaluate them against the list of AI capabilities you’ve adopted, looking for cases where AI technology changes the way a process works.
2. Consult process owners
The people who know best what needs to change within a process to accommodate AI are the ones who perform or oversee that process on a day-to-day basis.
For this reason, organizations should consult the “owners” of processes that will be impacted by AI adoption, discuss how they currently perform tasks, and identify how their workflows should change in response to AI tool usage. They should also determine which new types of risks or challenges the business will need to manage when it adds AI to an existing process.
3. Identify opportunities for the expansion of AI adoption
The goal of process transformation shouldn’t be limited to accommodating the changes taking place at present. Businesses should also consider how they might make further use of AI tools in the future and which additional process changes they’ll need to implement to support those changes.
This exercise is particularly valuable for identifying opportunities to root out manual work in processes. AI is excellent at making dynamic, automated decisions – the types that traditionally require input from humans. Seizing on that capability, businesses can implement plans to continue to evolve business processes to take further advantage of AI over time.
4. Integrate AI directly into business processes
The approach that many organizations take to leveraging AI is to generate data via a business process and then feed the data into an external tool to make decisions. This works, but it stops short of making business processes as efficient as they can be.
Ideally, organizations will go a step further by fully integrating AI directly into their processes. A good example to follow in this regard is that being set by SAP through its business AI initiative. Unlike many other large platform vendors, SAP isn’t expecting customers to deploy standalone AI tools and find ways of connecting them to its systems. Instead, it’s embedding AI features directly into the processes and capabilities that are built into its ERP platform.
Put another way, rather than settling for processes that are assisted by external AI tools, SAP is making AI inseparable from the processes, maximizing both ease of use and efficiency. This is what happens when the transformation toward AI-friendly processes is fully complete.
Conclusion: Embracing AI-centric business process transformation
The difference between a company that thrives in the age of AI and one that struggles won’t boil down to which specific AI tools each company uses or even necessarily to which use cases it targets. Instead, it will hinge on how effectively each company is able to transform its processes in ways that open them up to taking full advantage of AI.
This type of transformation is what businesses of all types should be prioritizing at present as they navigate the new world wrought by modern AI technology.
