How AI can drive business transformation

The race to implement artificial intelligence solutions across the enterprise is in full swing. Most are using AI to drive down bottom-line costs by doing things quicker or more frequently than they did before. The potential for time and cost savings are immense, but almost no one defines what they are going to do with the time that they save.

At the same time, while increased efficiency can help reduce bottom-line costs today, businesses will need to transform to stay competitive in an AI-driven future. But how do you transform without increasing bottom line costs? With the right mindset shift and strategy, we can capitalize on the gains AI is offering today to help drive transformation.

AI is freeing up time and increasing pressure for business transformation. In doing so, it is both the problem and the solution. AI capabilities today can help free up employees so they can focus on business transformation without increasing bottom-line costs. Instead of just cutting costs today, let’s invest the savings into making our businesses competitive for the future.

Freeing up potential

Just how many work hours will AI save employees? We are already starting to get some concrete answers. A survey of employees using AI today, found nearly half are already reporting time savings of five or more hours per week. At ServiceNow, after just four months, we found that GenAI “was doing the work equivalent to 50 full-time employees on an annualized basis.” We are still in the initial stages of fully leveraging AI to boost efficiency.

Estimates of what is possible suggest even more time savings. In a survey of global professionals in the legal, tax, and risk & compliance fields, respondents estimated time savings of 12 hours per week in the next five years, which “is the equivalent productivity boost of adding an extra colleague for every 10 team members on staff.” And a new report looking globally estimates “that generative AI could add up to $20 trillion to global GDP by 2030 and save 300 billion work hours a year.”

While it is early days still, today’s results and tomorrow’s estimates suggest tremendous opportunities for AI to free up employees’ time. To maximize on this opportunity, we need to see this time as potential and strategically capitalize on this moment.

Strategic time savings

It is possible to squander the time savings AI produces. For example, let’s say you deploy an AI solution that allows your staff to do things more quickly and efficiently. If you save everyone 30 minutes a day, then that doesn’t necessarily mean much to the company. It means everyone will have an extra coffee break or a longer lunch. It is only when you are strategic and pursue organizational redesign that concentrates and maximizes that time that you get real value.

Now instead imagine that you have 10,000 people handling HR issues, customer service, technology support, and managing the business. If you can save each of them one hour a day by deploying AI solutions, then you have freed up 1,200 heads. Here is where companies can make strategic decisions to maximize this time savings. Instead of spreading the time savings so everyone gets a longer coffee break, can you consolidate it so entire teams or departments are freed up? When you concentrate the time savings, you open up the possibility for transformation.

Time to transform

It is easy to see employees’ and entire business unit’s saved time just in terms of cost savings. If AI can do the work, then that is time you no longer have to pay someone else to do that work. But that approach would be shortsighted.

AI is set to upend how we live and work in ways we cannot even imagine. This will put pressure on companies to quickly adapt in a fast-changing AI landscape. And AI will create opportunities for companies that think outside the box to be the disruptors revolutionizing the market. To be relevant tomorrow, companies need to have different skills and business models than they have today. Companies need to think about the talent that they have and the talent that they need.  Businesses will need change agents, creatives, subject matter experts, and experience developers. These are the people who are going to drive change as much as the data scientists and model trainers.

Business transformation is crucial and companies will need to devote staffing and resources to make the transition happen. Artificial intelligence can be used to free the resources that allow you to drive organizational change to enable you to transform your business.

Fostering transformation

What can you do to pursue business transformation with the employees and time that is freed up by AI? Here are three steps you can take to foster transformation:

1. Upskilling

Instead of laying off workers whose time has been freed up, focus on upskilling those workers to meet the needs of your business. What are your strategic goals and how can your employees help you get there? Transformation can come from within, especially when you provide opportunities for your employees to take part. The value in upskilling is that you can promote the specific skills you need and you retain employees who already have history, knowledge, and connection to your business and its mission.

2. Skills mapping

AI could also step in to help you maximize the potential of employees’ new free time. Intelligent skills mapping could guide employees toward upskilling opportunities. It could also connect employees to new projects. As you define your transformation goals, skills mapping could identify employees with the skills needed to help you achieve those goals.

Intelligent skills management could be pushed even further to shape whose time is freed up. Once you mapped out all your projects and the skills each project needs, you could actively target employees whose workload you wanted to reduce so that you could free them up for the new projects. And in the future, AI could potentially even help generate the new projects and business units that employees could shift to when efficiencies are created.

3. Innovation

Last, once those employees and teams are freed up, you can direct them to focus on innovation. This is the moment to imagine what is next for your organization. What new product can you offer? What unique AI application can you build? What reimagined business process can you design? What visionary business unit can you create? In other words, what innovations can you imagine that help give your business a competitive edge into the future?

Transformation involves reinvention and that can only happen when you devote the people and resources to help make it happen. The speed and enormous potential of AI technology is putting pressure on all of us to transform so we remain competitive in an AI-driven future.

Luckily, AI also offers an answer today for how we can begin our transformation journeys. So, instead of thinking about deploying AI today so you can eliminate jobs, try shifting your mindset to think about the future. This isn’t about AI removing 1200 jobs. This is about AI being used to provide free resources that allow you to transform your business by getting the resources that you need. 

What AI causes is just as important as what it does. Having an extra 1200 heads to build out a new business unit or create a new product line, that is something that can fundamentally transform the direction of your company. Seize this opportunity, and lead with creativity and innovation at the forefront. You never know what amazing new business value you might generate when you use the resources that you have and prioritize the future of your business, rather than just the bottom-line today.