AI Best Next Steps Workshop
Confidently define and move forward with your team’s best next steps in your AI journey, with success criteria at the ready to evaluate how you did and what you learned
Driver
It can be daunting to chart a path forward in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation space. Technology is changing rapidly, and it’s tricky to wade through the hype for specific tools and services.
Plus: early AI efforts don’t fit neatly within typical budgeting and planning practices, so getting started can be particularly tough.
Outcome
Identifying clear next steps for the team’s AI path — taking advantage of specific strengths and addressing key opportunities — will jump-start progress. Moreover, having discussed where the team is particularly suited for AI and collaboratively defined what to pursue in the near-term will build confidence throughout the team that this fuzzy area of AI and automation can be understood and harnessed. Leaving with success criteria that include learning objectives will support iterative improvement, layering success upon success.
Approach
The FlexPoint team has developed an assessment around critical aspects of team and technical readiness for AI. It includes:
Culture and Risk Tolerance: AI initiatives will inevitably include surprises, setbacks, and learning. The better your team is able to plan for and respond to dynamic efforts, the more you’re set up for success with artificial intelligence.
AI Experience and Comfort Level: How your team feels about AI in general and how much you all have used AI (professionally and personally) shapes your collective best next step. Familiarity with AI, curiosity about how it can be of benefit, and some level of support for using it effectively are key components to success in this area.
Readiness to Act: If you know who you’ll work with on the next AI initiative, you’re that much closer to success. In the same vein, you’ll want to have the inputs for AI initiatives at the ready, potentially data to be analyzed, processes to automate, and more.
AI Roadmap Stage: Every team – and individual – has their own specific stops on the AI journey, but we can bucket them into a roadmap of sorts, from curiosity through targeted exploration all the way to having targeted AI use cases. The speed we move along the roadmap relates to how urgent and important it seems for your team to adopt AI, and how clearly your goals connect to AI opportunities.
Technical Foundation: The success of an AI initiative is greatly reliant on inputs. Often this includes cleansed, organized data or defined, repeatable processes. If your technical inputs for AI and automation are ready to go, you’re at a major advantage. Many of us realize we have considerable work to do cleansing and cataloging data to be used with a large language model or mapping our processes to be automated.
Budget and Investment Valuation: If you’re familiar with the evolution from waterfall to Agile project approaches, funding AI initiatives takes this journey a step further. Not only do we not know the outcome of an AI initiative (and the return it will bring), we may not even know all of the steps. If your budgeting and planning process allows for the ambiguity and R&D-like nature of AI initiatives, it will serve you very well.
We’ll have each participant complete the assessment prior to the workshop, compile findings, and bring tailored recommendations to the session. Then, together we’ll discuss assessment findings to ground the group in various perspectives (spending extra time on items with meaningful differences in responses through the group).
With a shared understanding of the team’s strengths and opportunities related to AI, we’ll brainstorm next steps that seem most productive. These will likely include defining an AI initiative that leans into areas of strength, with clear success criteria and learning objectives. We may also identify steps to address the most pressing opportunity, particularly if it’s holding back meaningful progress.
We’ll leave the workshop with confidence in the team’s near-term AI and automation plan, and knowing that we’re set up for continued learning, too.
Interested in learning more?
