By Marc Stephenson |
March 7, 2025
The challenges of introducing AI into your organisation
As more and more organisations look to embrace the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), our Director and Information Management guru, Marc Stephenson, shares his experience with a prospective customer and the challenges they faced when looking to introduce AI in one of their information systems.
Read on:
I was recently working with a prospective client who aspires to use AI in one of their information systems.
Many organisations, of course, have such aspirations without really understanding how they might use AI, other than “we want our product to be AI enabled.” However, the client in question already had some solid AI use cases. Ways in which AI could really deliver value to them, and by value, I mean more than the usual GenAI LLM summarisation tasks spouted by many AI vendors.
As we discussed what was possible, how it could be done, and when it could be done, the client kept moving the required work further into the future. Why did they do that? They had very good justifications to embrace AI, but they couldn’t (quite) commit. The simple reason: AI is hard!
AI enabling an information system requires thoughtful technical, and more importantly, information design.
There are also many process and governance issues to understand and overcome. For my prospective client, doing all this work sooner rather than later just wasn’t worth it – they preferred to get on with the non-AI design, without being sidetracked by all the AI nice-to-haves.
Being a consultant, I was of course slightly disappointed that they took this line – the AI work would have been interesting and looks good on a CV! At the same time, I understood their point. Given this organisation had better than normal AI use cases, it made me think if this decision would also be made by other clients.
I firmly believe that AI will change our lives, but maybe it’s still in the “too hard” category? At least for the moment.
