Develop Your Organization’s Vision for AI

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Define what an AI strategy is and why it’s important.
Identify strategic stakeholders and form an AI center of excellence.
Explain how to develop your organization’s vision for AI.
Assess your organization’s readiness for AI.

A New Frontier in Business

AI is a tectonic shift that is already having a major impact on business. And there’s no question that AI will drastically change how we work over the coming years. But we’re still in the early days of this technological revolution, and many organizations are unsure about how to move forward. When is the best time to dive in? How do you find the right AI use cases? Will there be enough return on investment? Is your data ready? What about the risks? And how does your organization need to evolve?

Meet Coral Cloud Resorts

Alex Wu, VP of Business Intelligence at Coral Cloud Resorts, is all too familiar with these questions because they’ve been keeping him awake at night. Coral Cloud is a luxury hospitality company, with resorts operating in some of the world’s most glamorous destinations. Alex has been experimenting with AI on his own and dreaming up ways that AI might transform the hospitality industry.

Alex Wu in his Coral Cloud Resorts office sitting at his desk with his laptop and an ocean view through the window

But when it comes to AI at Coral Cloud, it’s been a while since the organization implemented a few predictive AI solutions in its sales and service business units. And the company doesn’t have any new pilot projects on the horizon. Overall, Coral Cloud is stuck in the investigation stage, evaluating newer AI technologies and having endless conversations about the best way to get started. Alex knows that Coral Cloud lacks vision and direction for AI, and he suspects that an AI strategy could help the organization figure out what it’s trying to achieve.

Learn the Key to AI Success

And in fact, Alex has stumbled upon a significant factor for determining AI success. Where do most organizations go wrong with AI? They get hung up on the technology itself, and they don’t link their AI efforts to actual business objectives. And if you can’t prove that your AI projects deliver value and impact the bottom line, the momentum you’ve built around AI in your organization will surely start to fade. And once that momentum disappears, it can be incredibly difficult to gain support for future AI initiatives.

Define an AI Strategy

That’s why it’s important to develop an AI strategy. Basically, an AI strategy is your organization’s path to delivering business value with AI. In this module, we follow along with Alex as he starts the right conversations in his organization and helps stakeholders formulate a direction for AI. Over the course of this module, Coral Cloud will:

Define the organization’s vision for AI.
Evaluate risks and establish AI governance.
Identify and assess AI use cases.

And in Unit 3 of this module, Coral Cloud finalizes its AI strategy by prioritizing their use cases and choosing the right one as a pilot project. But how will Coral Cloud ensure that its pilot project actually makes it to production?

When you complete this badge, move on to the AI + Data: Project Planning module, where you’ll learn how Coral Cloud plans its AI project to set it up for success. And in the Connect Data Cloud to Copilot and Prompt Builder project, you’ll follow along step-by-step as Coral Cloud’s admin implements the project in Salesforce.

Create Your Data Strategy

It’s hard for an organization to develop a successful AI strategy without also having a data strategy. After all, data is the foundation of all AI systems.

If you haven’t already, start thinking about your roadmap for developing your organization’s practices around data quality, management, infrastructure, unification, governance, scalability, and so on. Ultimately, a solid data strategy maximizes the value your organization can derive from its AI investments. For more information about data strategy and readiness, see the Resources section.

Assemble Strategic Stakeholders

At this point, you might be wondering how Coral Cloud is going to orchestrate all the work that goes into developing an AI strategy. Alex understands that in order for Coral Cloud to succeed with AI, the company needs to go beyond ad hoc efforts and one-off solutions. It’s time for a holistic approach that acknowledges AI’s strategic importance to the business.

Alex works with other executives at Coral Cloud to establish an AI center of excellence (also called a council, advisory board, or committee). The goal is to assemble a multidisciplinary leadership team with expertise in technology, data, department-specific knowledge, and the needs of the business. The makeup of the committee depends on each unique organization, but generally, leadership from the following areas should be represented.

Business departments (sales, marketing, support, and so on)
Information technology
Security
Engineering
Data science
Business intelligence
Legal
Finance
Operations

One of the benefits of forming a cross-functional team is that it encourages collaboration. Individual departments are less likely to move forward with their own fragmented AI solutions without considering company-wide concerns, such as duplication of effort, integration, scalability, governance, and security. Plus, it can prevent a disconnect between the technology teams that develop AI solutions and the departments trying to achieve specific business goals.

Establish the Committee’s Responsibilities

The next step for our newly formed AI dream team is to define their charter. What are their responsibilities? At the end of a long discussion, they decide the group will be responsible for:

Defining the organization’s AI vision
Securing executive buy-in
Identifying strategic barriers
Establishing AI governance
Evaluating potential use cases and building an AI roadmap
Making decisions about core AI and data capabilities
Allocating resources
Planning for scale and organizational change
Championing adoption
Reviewing outcomes and evolving the strategy

Your center of excellence may be different from Coral Cloud’s, but the ultimate goal is the same—to deliver on the promise of AI by achieving better business outcomes. To learn more about creating an AI center of excellence, see the Resources section.

Having a centralized AI committee shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation. That’s why we recommend taking a two-pronged approach to AI strategy.

Bottom-up: Democratize access to AI, allowing employees to experiment. It encourages enthusiasm and familiarity with the technology and sparks potential use cases. You can centralize and scale the best ideas.
Top-down: Provide direction from leadership to define the overall AI strategy and transform vision into value.

Define Your AI Vision

Now that the center of excellence is in place, Alex leads the charge to establish a shared vision for AI across all of the strategic stakeholders. The group will establish business goals and align on their AI ambitions.

Establish Business Goals

Alex knows that AI priorities come from business priorities, so he encourages stakeholders to review Coral Cloud’s most critical business objectives for the next couple years and think about areas where AI might have an impact. Here are the top goals.

Improve guest satisfaction scores by 15%.
Increase hotel occupancy rates by 20%.
Reduce operating costs by 5%.
Increase cross-sell conversion rates by 15%.
Achieve 10% year-over-year revenue growth.

When it comes to prioritizing AI use cases, it’s important to think strategically about which projects can deliver the greatest value for the business. You learn more about finding and prioritizing use cases in a later unit.

Computer screens in an office display colorful line graphs and a pie chart.

Align on AI Ambitions

Next, it’s time to talk about ambition: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was an AI portfolio. Coral Cloud’s leadership team decides to take an incremental approach to AI transformation.

Short-term: Start small with internal pilot projects that boost productivity and improve employee satisfaction. Experiment quickly by customizing out-of-the-box AI solutions that integrate easily into existing workflows. Build internal support for AI, boost adoption, and learn important lessons before deploying AI solutions to customers.
Mid-term: Implement both turnkey and custom AI solutions for employees and customers that require more effort and AI maturity. Solutions for employees might focus on front office and back office use cases. Solutions for customers might include personalization, AI agents, and more.
Long-term: Incorporate AI into R&D and product development to build AI-powered products and services. These projects require a lot of time and effort, but they can eventually result in game-changing outcomes and competitive advantage.

Coral Cloud doesn’t want to focus too narrowly on short-term projects and potentially lose out on new revenue opportunities, industry-disrupting innovation, or new business models. The organization will implement some quick wins with AI while also planning ahead for more transformative change.

Is Your Organization Ready for AI?

At this point, Coral Cloud has defined its AI vision, but do they have the right people, processes, and technology in place to deliver on their lofty goals? What’s the organization’s AI maturity level?

Alex uses MITRE’s AI maturity model and organizational assessment tool guide (PDF) to evaluate Coral Cloud’s AI maturity. It turns out that the company has a lot of work to do on that front, but Alex finds it helpful to review the types of organizational changes that are necessary for AI success. Be sure to take the assessment at your organization and read about the different stages of AI maturity.

In the next unit, Coral Cloud addresses a big concern about AI: the risks and how to mitigate them.

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