As we begin 2024, it's no longer a question of whether to adopt AI-driven tools and strategies. These days, forward-thinking business leaders are actively considering how to adopt and implement AI successfully, in order to minimize risks and maximize the strategic rewards.
That's partly because AI is already all around us, whether we realize it or not—and it's not just the voice-activated personal assistants in our phones and speakers or the algorithms that choose what we see on news and social media sites.
Software of all kinds is now designed to draw on the power of AI, from business productivity tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Generative AI can help write and summarize documents or create striking images out of whole cloth based on verbal prompts.
And of course, AI-enabled capabilities have been baked into modern ERP systems for years now. The ability to detect and recognize patterns and anomalies, and to analyze massive amounts of real-time business data, augments the forecasting, problem-solving, and data visualization tools in ERPs. It's what allows companies to automate repetitive tasks and enables team members to develop new applications without knowing how to code, so they can reach new heights of productivity and achievement.
The incentives are clear. The right ERP can draw on AI to help you make smarter business decisions and help your team members accomplish dramatically more in less time.
By now, everyone's aware of the benefits of digital transformation. You can think of this as one especially crucial part of that process: AI transformation.
There are a lot of options out there, so it's important not to get overwhelmed by the possibilities. One way to cut through the noise is to start with a careful assessment of your needs and your goals.
Do you need better forecasting? Improved cash flow? More efficient customer service? Predictive maintenance, so you can detect potential equipment problems and address them before they cause costly downtime? Clearer visibility into your supply chain, with the ability to game out possible future disruptions so that you can put contingency plans in place? The right ERP system can deliver all this and much more.
As you perform this assessment, it can be of enormous benefit to have an expert partner with a long track record of implementations by your side, who can draw on that experience to help you ask the right questions and lay out a solid road map for the journey ahead.
That's true not just for the implementation itself, but for all phases of the project including planning, testing, and follow-through, to make sure that team members are getting the ongoing education and training they need to guarantee that the technology is fully adopted and used successfully.
One of the greatest uses for AI is helping you better understand the data that's already available to you. When your data is disorganized and scattered, you can't surface important insights in a timely way.
Getting your data into a centralized ERP allows you to use those AI-powered tools to connect the dots faster and more accurately, so you can see patterns, trends, and potential problems to be addressed. Making that data accessible to all team members, with everyone working from the same up-to-date source of truth, helps drive forward progress as well.
But getting to that point also means making an investment in cleaning up your data so that it's accurate and consistently formatted. In order to make good decisions, you need good data. Lots of organizations are drowning in massive amounts of data these days, but the quality of that data matters as much as the quantity.
As you focus on data quality, it's important to think in terms of governance. That means making sure that you've got the right processes and policies in place to manage your data correctly and ensure its consistency, usability, and integrity.
A critical piece of this is making sure that your data is properly tagged and safeguarded before it's made available, in order to protect your security and intellectual property.
That also means making sure that all team members are up to speed on those processes and policies as well, so that everyone's playing by the same rules and working together for success.
Getting your organization fully up to speed on the capabilities of AI tools isn't something that happens overnight. In fact, it's often more effective to take a gradual approach.
In order to get team members on board, it helps for them to see the way that these tools can make their jobs easier and help them achieve more. Sometimes that can be as simple as letting them see what they can accomplish with AI-powered desktop productivity tools— automating tasks like summarizing long documents and turning them into PowerPoint presentations, or taking a bunch of raw data and analyzing it in Excel.
From there, you might show them how to create impactful data visualizations with Power BI, or the exciting possibilities for creating low-code applications and workflows with Power Apps and Power Automate, drawing on the power of Robotic Process Automation (RBA) and Digital Process Automation (DPA).
In other words, a gradual rollout that allows team members to assimilate these new tools over time, in a managed and practical way, can really pay off. Done right, this “crawl, walk, run” approach can help team members open up their minds to bigger and better ways to use AI as they take each next step forward, rather than overwhelming them with too much information all at once.
Want to learn more about how Columbus can help your organization harness the full capabilities of AI? Get in touch with us today.