Selling Artificial Intelligence To The Business: Keep It Clear, Keep It Simple

Many business leaders are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence, but when it comes to investing in the technology, they may be bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. It doesn’t have to be this way. We canvassed people who work closely with AI solutions and asked them to share their experiences on the best approaches to sell AI 00 the right AI, at the right time, to business leaders.

For starters, it’s imperative to “show ‘cognitive courtesy,’” advises Bjorn Austraat, senior vice president and head of AI acceleration at Truist. “Invest time and effort up front to translate difficult technical concepts into plain English. Likewise, create a compelling, properly framed vision for all project participants to ensure alignment and productive collaboration.”

Austraat explains that he uses a “simple phrase” to advance the vision of AI. Ask: “’Whose life is going to get better, by how much and how do we know that?’” he says. “If you can truly answer that question, you have covered all the bases from framing, to deployment, to value proposition, to political air cover.”

This clarity of vision is strongly advised by other industry leaders. “The key to selling AI lies in clear, simple explanation of the business case,” agrees Ben Hookway, CEO of Relative Insight. “With consumer data flooding in from all directions, much of this is text-based. All of this qualitative text data can – and should – have strategic influence on brand strategy, product development, customer care, marketing, communications, and more. Much of this data is real-time and extremely valuable in helping to boost true understanding of exactly how customers feel.”

In Austraat’s industry, financial services, “explainability trumps model performance,” he adds. “In particularly sensitive areas such as credit underwriting, banks and other financial services institutions must balance the desire to innovate and use cutting-edge AI with the reasonable regulatory expectations around explainability, robustness and fairness. The hottest solution doesn’t always win, especially if it’s too much of a black box.”

It’s also important to impress upon business leaders that successful AI can take the business in new — and potentially positive — directions. “Businesses are not looking to buy sensors, cameras, or AI solutions – they look for a total solution that solves a business problem,” according to Ken Mills, CEO of EPIC iO. “If you are trying to sell sensors or video cameras to businesses, my advice is to team up with consultants or solution providers who can deliver complete answers to business problems.”

AI is all about making processes easier,” says Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO at Uniphore. “Whether it’s solving customer problems, eliminating manual tasks or making more accurate predictions, AI supplements human effort so humans can work, interact and innovate more efficiently.”

It goes even further — with the rise of far-reaching AI solutions such as conversational AI, providing “customers and employees access to elevated problem-solving capabilities, the world as we know it will change fundamentally,” writes Robb Wilson, founder of OneReach.ai in his latest book, Age of Invisible Machines. Business leaders need to understand that AI cannot succeed in the long run as disconnected, one-off projects. This “requires a holistic undertaking that touches on all aspects of your business. Random acts of technology—like deploying disparate machines that exist in isolation—will underwhelm your workforce and customers, leading to low adoption rates. A fully integrated approach, however, can bring about a totally new paradigm of productivity with unprecedented potential.”

Ultimately, the potential is vast, which can even awe the most AI-savvy individuals. “Creative automation used to be a reasonably magical innovation in digital marketing,” says Peter Gordon, global head of AI product for Hogarth Worldwide. “But nothing compares to typing the most bizarre sentence you can think of – something like ‘teddy bear on a skateboard in the middle of Times Square’ – and seeing AI instantly generate a perfect photorealistic image of your idea. Or talking to the chatbot of an impressively perceptive Steve Jobs that genuinely feels like a personal conversation. And there is so much more to come.”

Overcoming executive nervousness about AI is also key to successfully selling the technology. Peoples’ first reactions to AI “are perhaps a kind of magical fear,” Gordon says. It’s important for business leaders to understand that AI technology “enables them to do what they do best – supercharging the ideation processes to create on-brand ideas that have never been seen before.”

Where and how to get started? Keep it clear and simple, Wilson advises. “The easiest way to get started is often to automate internally first; start small by automating individual tasks and skills, not entire jobs. The simpler you make your starting point, the sooner you can test and iterate. The sooner you test and iterate, the sooner you can roll out an internal solution. You’ll continue testing and iterating on that solution, using the momentum to find new skills to develop, test, iterate on, and deliver. You’ll fumble often as you grow legs, but that’s part of the process, too.”

AI succeeds when it addresses pronounced business problems, or creates new opportunities. “When businesses consider AI, it’s because they have a need,” says Sachdev. “Some process is straining their resources or compromising their relationship with their customers, and they want to correct it as easily and cost-effectively as possible. Look for friction points. Which areas within a business process are slowing things down or putting an undue burden on customers or employees? What outcomes would a business like to improve, and what’s keeping them from achieving them?”

For example, friction points that are addressable by AI are associated with customer experience. “If customers are struggling on the front end, perhaps AI can guide them by curating relevant content based on their past purchase and search histories,” says Sachdev. “If customer support is the issue, there are a wealth of possibilities to explore. AI can help identify customer intent, improve self-service interactions and even assist agents during live interactions. It can audit conversations for compliance and analyze them for quality assurance. In every case, it saves human workers time and effort.”