Guide To Unlocking The Power of Generative AI

Is your business leveraging artificial intelligence? If not, you’re not alone. Andela’s research shows that 61 per cent of enterprise organisations haven’t adopted artificial intelligence (AI) tools. However, the landscape is rapidly evolving with over 2,400 businesses in Africa specialising in AI. Statista projects the Generative AI market in Africa will soar to a staggering $1.51 billion this year alone, with forecasts indicating a monumental rise to $3.8 billion by 2028.

But the reward is worth the effort, as companies failing to adapt risk falling behind more forward-thinking competitors. AI tools can make quicker work of large data sets and leverage the data companies already have. While most companies collect and store tons of data, they are not yet utilising the revolutionary AI tools that can analyse and act upon that data in intelligent ways.

To support this important digital transformation, we’ve put together a design thinking model, complete with four steps to help businesses get started on an AI project.

Determine a use case

Understanding both where AI excels and where a business can most benefit is a great starting place. A few use cases include summarisation, documentation, content creation, design, programming, or personalisation. While there are many more use cases out there, we recommend starting within one of these realms.

Many businesses struggle with managing vast quantities of unstructured data, such as processing countless PDFs to produce letters and legal findings, which traditionally consumes considerable manual effort in scanning and reviewing. Andela engineers have helped this process by leveraging ChatGPT into the business’s architecture to summarise the data, create content, and enable useful conversations through prompts. As a result, the team has achieved an 80 per cent reduction in time spent on researching and drafting, significantly streamlining their document processing workflow.

Internally, Andela also leverages AI within the Andela Talent Cloud to efficiently automate and manage the complete global talent lifecycle. It’s a mix of an amazing matching team but also AI, which is why we have a 96 percent success rate. Powerful AI-matching algorithms learn from hundreds of touch points in the hiring journey to pinpoint the best engineers for the roles and skills required.

Generate a company survey

To get started, first gather input from your company to home in on where AI can be the most beneficial. We recommend generating a survey across the company to help with data-driven decision-making. Then, set up a steering committee made up of champions from all stakeholders related to the identified business problems. By having advocates across the business, you gain buy-in across the organisation to help get the transformational changes you want.

Explain AI to your team

It’s crucial to properly explain AI and its potential if you want to gather the right use cases. All of your stakeholders likely have the info you need, they just need to be armed with how it can work. It’s well worth speaking with your engineers to present a variety of possible business use cases to the team or bringing in a consultant who can educate your teams on how AIs are trained.

Build a business case

Next, leverage the data and input collected from the survey or committee to prioritise. Is there an overwhelming amount of employees interested in AI support for a particular area? For example, the summarisation of information, accounting, or personalising interactions with clients.

Aggregate these results, identify common themes, and align them with overarching business benefits and a solid business case. Potential benefits may include cost reduction, productivity enhancement, revenue generation, competitive advantage, a deeper understanding of AI capabilities, or enhanced employee satisfaction.

Incorporating a business case and ROI analysis will help in determining the focal points for team development and the business objectives your generative AI project will advance.

Validate your customer journey

Before you start any project, remember to stay focused on your customer. Get a clear picture of your customer journey and look at the pain points across awareness, consideration, decision, service, and advocacy. How does AI solve a real customer problem?

Once you define your current customer journey, it can help you understand what a new one could look like.

Define measurement

Lastly, understand what metrics you will use to measure success and ROI. Ask yourself questions that you will get from the business to help define these. You can consider questions like:

• How is user engagement measured?
• How does AI help with retention through hyper-personalisation?
• How much can we reduce cost?
• How fast can a workflow or process be improved?
• What programming languages are your developers familiar with and is the architecture scalable
• What data do you need to make your AI successful?
• How can you ensure your AI meets ethical standards?

Prerequisites

Don’t forget that as you define your project, you will also need a strong team to make this vision come to life.

Eric Mumene, Director of IT, Andela Kenya