MIT SMR Connections
MIT SMR Connections was an independent unit within MIT Sloan Management Review. Operating separately from the editorial group, it created high-quality, sponsor-funded content. Connections no longer produces new content, but previously published sponsor-funded projects remain available on the MIT SMR website.
As established in Part 1 of this series, the first step on any AI journey is pinpointing what you hope to achieve with it.
“The question shouldn’t be ‘How can we get ourselves ready for AI?’” says Michael Wade, professor of innovation and strategy at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. “If you go down that road, you’ll end up doing AI for the sake of AI. A better question is: ‘What are the problems we need to solve? What are our opportunities, what are our threats?’ If the answer is ‘through AI,’ then do AI.”
The next step: making sure that you’ve identified all the critical business enablers and requirements — particularly the human and financial factors — needed to successfully use AI to solve the problems you’ve selected.
This Strategy Guide, the second in a four-part series, offers advice that can help you determine whether you’re ready, from a business standpoint, to launch an AI initiative. It provides expert insights about identifying stakeholders, creating partnerships, setting ROI goals, building strong AI teams, understanding automation and augmentation, incorporating continuous learning, establishing governance and ongoing oversight, and addressing AI-related bias, risk, compliance, and ethical issues.