Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly rising to become among the most powerful forces in the business environment. It is revolutionizing how organizations operate, boosting efficiency, optimizing the decision-making process and enhancing the competitiveness of companies. In a recent survey, 70% of business decision-makers agreed that AI initiatives are no longer experimental because they have viable business uses. Another 84% agree that AI opportunity is bigger today than it has ever been, and businesses must implement it to remain competitive.

Like many business executives, you may have jumped into implementing AI initiatives to keep up with the trends without envisioning growth and scalability. Now that it is time to expand these initiatives across the organization, you need effective strategies to create future success. Below are strategies you can use to scale the use of AI across your organization.

1. Review the Initial AI Implementation

Your initial AI implementation provides numerous opportunities to learn from and informs your strategies for scaling. Reviewing your pilot AI initiatives provides valuable insights regarding the success, challenges and failures of the implementation. It is also a chance to identify gaps and limitations in the resources, processes, workflows and methodologies that may stall the successful expansion of the machine learning technology to the entire organization.

You can leverage the information gathered in this review phase to allocate adequate resources to help successful expansion and sustainable growth. By looking at what worked and what did not in the first round of implementation, you can find the AI technologies that are suited to your needs and provide the most value. It also serves as a foundation for establishing key performance indicators to track and measure the success of your expanded AI initiatives.

2. Align AI With Business Objectives

As a company, you must understand your business objectives to develop a customized AI business or marketing strategy that helps the success of your future AI use cases. Determine the goals and objectives you want to achieve with your expansion. These may range from optimizing operations and streamlining workflows to developing new products and improving customer satisfaction.

Your AI implementation or expansion strategy must reflect your company's goals, its competitive advantages and where it is headed. This alignment can help deliver tangible value and contribute to the organization's overall success. Other advantages of this strategy include:

• Achieving a high return on investment
• Increasing buy-in and adoption rates
• Generating valuable and actionable insights that inform decision making
• Ensuring efficient allocation of resources
• Creating a blueprint for ongoing success, adaptability and scalability

AI strategy consulting allows you to work with professionals to help you identify and prioritize AI use cases that are in sync with your business objectives. Professionals go a step further and assess how feasible each use case is before creating a detailed AI implementation strategy that outlines the necessary steps, resources and timelines required for expansion.

3. Build a Cross-Functional AI Team

Expanding AI use cases across an entire organization requires you to assemble people with diverse skills and knowledge. This allows you to achieve an approach that can help with successful long-term application and growth.

If you are looking to focus your expansion efforts on AI for marketing, it is best to have a cross-functional team that includes individuals with technical, project management and domain-specific skills. These are often a mix of team members from the marketing, operations, IT, data science and customer support teams.

The members of such a cross-functional team bring different perspectives and insights that enhance decision-making. Risk mitigation is also enhanced because the team can collaborate and communicate, better anticipating and addressing inherent risks before they become unmanageable. A diverse team also reduces communication silos and bottlenecks that may threaten the adoption of future AI expansion — at least one person in every unit can know what to expect during AI implementation.

Seeking the services of AI strategy consultants can help you develop cross-functional AI teams. This happens by conducting training and enablement programs that empower employees with knowledge of AI fundamentals. This makes it easier to implement the expansion in various company areas because most employees are up to speed with what to expect and how they can contribute.

4. Designate AI Champions

Having multiple AI champions helps improve the chances of successful expansion of AI use cases. These employees should understand the capabilities and expected challenges that come with the adoption of AI.

These individuals make the best team leaders and can also act as influencers, promoters, facilitators and advocates of AI. Their role has a host of uses, which include:

• Promoting AI awareness and understanding
• Aligning AI initiatives to a team's goals, values and culture
• Bridging the communication gap between technical and non-technical teams
• Facilitating the integration of AI initiatives into existing workflows and processes
• Providing feedback to management about the effectiveness of the AI initiatives

Most importantly, your AI champions can help with change management because they can guide their colleagues through the changes, their importance and how AI can help improve their roles instead of eliminate them. They can also build a positive AI culture and address concerns and questions from other employees effectively.

Work on Your AI Expansion Initiatives With BDO Digital's Comprehensive Suite of Services

Working with a professional team when optimizing your AI business strategy helps speed up the process and boost your return on investment. At BDO Digital, we have a full suite of AI services that provide end-to-end support for successful AI implementation, adoption and expansion. We can help you assess your pilot AI use cases and develop a detailed expansion plan.

Our services also include training and workshops to help employees adapt to the changes with ongoing support to foster a smooth transition. We can also train your selected AI champions to build their confidence in the AI implementation process so they can drive a smooth transition and positive buy-in across the organization.