Unlocking AI potential: Your guide to readiness and governance

Over the last 85 years, artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved from a singular field of cybernetics research to algorithms that can learn your personal preferences and provide tailored recommendations. Today, the AI technology landscape has expanded further, with cutting-edge tools like generative AI that can generate new content, expanding the AI potential your organization can capitalize on.

Companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon have kept up with this evolution, continuing to capitalize on these cutting-edge tools to stay at the forefront of their respective industries. Between 2018 and 2022, digital leaders have grown their active customer base at 0.5% with operating expenses only increasing 1.3% annually while laggards saw zero active customer base growth and operating expenses increasing at a nearly doubled rate (2.3% annually) [1].

This displays the reality of today's competitive market – becoming an early technology adopter is crucial to the longevity of your organization, allowing you to reap the benefits of change and ensure that when new technologies come out, you won’t lag behind the competition. But before your organization can begin to capitalize on AI, it’s important to have a strong understanding of your AI journey and well-developed readiness and governance efforts in place to lay the foundation for safe and responsible usage.

Defining your AI journey

To ensure the AI solutions you pursue align with your business identity, culture and long-term vision, ask yourself “Who are we as a business?” to identify the strengths and unique attributes of your organization. Then asking, “Where are we going?” forces you to clarify your business goals and how AI fits into your strategic direction, ensuring that your AI initiatives are not just trendy experiments but are aligned with your broader objectives.

Walking through an AI journey map can help your organization begin establishing an AI road map that’s specific to your unique requirements and in alignment with your organizational strategy. Consider questions like:

• What does your organization do really well?
• Where do you compete?
• What are your goals? (i.e., scale, expand geographically, approach a new demographic, free up cash, better manage inventory, optimize supply chain, etc.)
• How is the market changing?
• Do you have any specific use cases, such as back-office processes, that AI can solve for today?

The key is to not focus on a “big bang” approach and instead focus on smaller business use cases for AI that can showcase its value before expanding into more ambitious initiatives. Your initial use cases should focus on areas ripe with manual processes or human intervention – leveraging AI’s automation ability and allowing your people to focus on value-added tasks. Identifying and implementing these small use cases is how your organization will begin to innovate with AI, improving your ability to compete, scale and manage resources more effectively.

Incoming AI legislation

Across the US, policy makers are recognizing the need to address ethical, privacy and safety concerns associated with the rapidly advancing AI technologies, with two states (CO, UT) having already passed legislation. Incoming legislation is focused on protecting consumers, employees and business partners from adverse decisions made by AI by ensuring organizations that develop and deploy AI models have strong AI governance programs in place and that they are repeatedly undergoing an impact assessment to ensure AI decisions are transparent and being made fairly and without bias. While there are currently no US federal AI regulations for private-sector organizations, it’s important to begin thinking about how you should position your organization to be prepared as future regulations are enacted.

AI readiness: Preparing for AI

To prepare for these incoming regulations and ensure your organization is using AI in a fair, ethical and responsible manner, organizations should assess their current state against the five dimensions of AI readiness by conducting an AI readiness assessment to identify and address risks or gaps prior to launching or accelerating AI initiatives.

Leveraging this model to assess your organization’s current state can help to ensure you’ve considered not only your technological aspects, but also your strategic alignment, workforce readiness and any regulatory obligations specific to your industry or market to ensure a holistic approach to AI adoption.

AI governance: Developing a program

Many organizations are familiar with having a secure data governance program focused on managing, monitoring and making the right data accessible to the right people in your organization. An AI governance program has a similar focus – ensuring you mitigate risk, build trust and provide your people with centralized and standardized framework that will help drive AI standards across your organization.

Developing an AI governance program will ensure your organization is able to maintain oversight and controlled growth of your AI systems and will allow you to comply with incoming regulations more easily. Your AI governance program should have:

1. Policy, standards and ethics that are well established, vetted and align with your strategic priorities and organizational values
2. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined by designating the right people in the right places, ensuring people understand their responsibilities within the organization and who to contact regarding questions around AI
3. Risk and compliance programs are well defined and in alignment with the regulatory environment your organization operates in. Consider implementing the NIST AI Risk Management Framework [2] as it’s considered a compliant program with current legislation.
4. Architecture and tools are standardized and vetted across the organization in relation to developing, training or leveraging internal and third-party AI models or software
5. AI model management to ensure your continually monitoring your AI systems verify that the decision they’re making are unbiased, fair and responsible
6. Observability and monitoring to ensure models are performing properly, being used properly, producing intended output and to detect, model and concept drift over time [3]

Overall, your AI governance program should be part of a broader AI center of excellence that considers not only standards listed above, but also your AI change management and adoption strategy as they will play a fundamental role in achieving and sustaining a successful AI implementation by laying the foundation for everyone across your organization to understand and embrace the incoming change.

How we can help

Getting started adopting AI can set your organization up to be a digital leader, capitalizing on the benefits of technological change and ensuring you don’t lag the competition. Baker Tilly’s digital solutions team can help your organization wherever you are on your AI journey – from defining your AI strategy to conducting a readiness assessment or designing a governance and risk management program. Interested in learning more? Contact one of our professionals today.

This article was derived from the Unlocking AI potential: Your guide to readiness and governance webinar, watch the full recording below.