New Work, New World. The enterprise strategy group I belong to within IBM recently started on a journey to adopt #generatieveai into our day-to-day ways of working. Through #ibmconsultingadvantage — a series of gen AI tools available to us — we will aim to get better, faster and more impactful with our strategy activities. We have targets of becoming anywhere from 20% to 75% more efficient with different activities. As the head of my group Vivek Kapur said: “The world is changing, let’s be on the right side of history" so off we went...
Initial observations on what’s worked:
(1) Provide Specific, Actionable Guidance: My longtime strategy mentor, Jeanne Liedtka says in her new book "The Experimentation Fieldbook” that what’s often missing from executing high-quality experiments is actionable, specific guidance. I agree 100% — our teams really didn’t know “how” to start. So, this past week, we had Tess Rock and Othul Hock from IBM’s Customer Success team come visit us to do exactly this, it was an awesome enablement session that stirred up quite a bit of excitement amongst our teams.
(2) Upskilling Occurs in Leaps & Bounds with Digital Natives: many that are leading experiments from our team are #digitalnatives. They don’t know floppy disks, blue DOS screens, dial-up internet other than having learned of them in their computer science books. So, when we started experimenting with applying tools this week, I was wow’d by the gusto and accelerated savvy with which they did this. Watch out world, our strategists are soon-to-become data engineers!
(3) Key Starting Activities: we’ve landed on a handful of initial use cases which include:
▶ using assistants to do market research and due diligence
▶ chatting with documents to summarize large pools of information
▶ summarizing notes from interviews/design thinking sessions/client meetings
▶ developing deck outlines to accelerate storyboarding
▶ creating personas to help us put our users at the center of our strategy and experience design
▶ using tools to support proposal development
(4) Gen AI will not take over Humans: while generative AI is poised to disrupt as much as 90% of our workforce, it will not replace us altogether. Yes, digital labor will replace repeatable activities and predictive patterning. However, decision making, problem solving and critical thinking will still absolutely be required by humans to bring value to data and information. These tools will only dial us up the value chain.
In the next three weeks we will conduct a series of rapid Generative AI Rallies to expand on our playground experimentation. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on progress, wish us luck!
Lasith Perera Joswin Leslie Phillip Reamer David Gerken Christian Dula, MBA Rachel D. Rogers Kevin Moreau Connor McAndrew Sari Kassar Michael Bailey Christopher Arms, SPC Haskel Harvey Paul Veiga, MBA, CPA Liz (Bivins) Davis Dane Gregerson Leonard Kuang Tucker Rizzi Suman Gidwani
Associate Partner @ IBM | Maximo, Data & AI
3wConsultants at IBM are working fearlessly in this unprecedented time to leverage AI to revolutionize our own work processes, enhancing efficiency and productivity, and sharing these innovations with our clients.