In support of the IoD Surrey and Berkshire event “Unlocking AI Potential Conference - How Academia and Industry Can Partner to Empower SMEs”

I often get asked, “how should I approach this AI thing, how should I think about it?”.

My general advice is to take some time to familiarise yourself with at least one (preferably more) of the most well-known tools, such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Anthropic’s Claude.

Explore what capabilities such as writing, summarisation, research reporting amongst other uses, might mean for you, whether at home, at work, at school, or elsewhere. Have a go. Once you’re familiar with these language-based tools, branch out into graphics, images, video and sound.

Obtaining a personal appreciation of the power, the potential opportunities (and their shortfalls) is the first step to understanding how your business might benefit from the use of generative AI. Then, I’d start reflecting on the following questions:

Strategic Questions

1. Which elements of your business need AI and why? Where can you automate, or make a business process quicker or slicker? Is there a new opportunity, product or service that is made possible with the promise of AI?
2. AI can be tuned to your business if you have data. So, where have you got unique data, at scale, that you’re prepared to experiment with, or are you able to create your own synthetic data for training an AI?
3. What is your understanding of the issues around ethics, bias and privacy in the implementation of AI?
4. What is the position and developing thinking around regulation and compliance in your sector and amongst the likely regulators (e.g.PRA, FSA, ICO, EU, etc)?

Positioning

1. How do you prepare the customer narrative – the benefits, concerns and brand with respect to AI? How do you maintain the essential dimension of trust when some people may be suspicious of AI?
2. What is your workforce narrative – how will you communicate how AI will impact your team’s jobs, careers, pay and opportunities in the future?
3. What is the impact on your customer base from the introduction of AI? e.g. what are the potential changes in customer relationship management through the use of AI

Implementation

1. How will your AI be designed to display the essential elements of transparency & explainability – perhaps for the purposes of internal governance, the regulators or maintaining the trust of your customers?
2. What is your understanding and approach to security, privacy and permissions in development and deployment of AI?
3. Is your current data management approach sufficient, given the potential use of open source data and 3rd party AI models?
4. How will your business estimate the costs of developing and maintaining AI at scale, especially given the volatility in pricing that affects AI platforms?
5. How does your organisation build awareness, transparency and management of your supply chains and their use of AI, including your AI suppliers?
6. Consider whether your organisation is already unwittingly dependent on AI through staff’s personal use of AI platforms to help them do their jobs, i.e. have you got a shadow AI problem?

Organisational Planning

1. What is your strategy for building and maintaining the necessary skills specific to AI development and deployment?
2. What is your non-AI specialist workforce training and education strategy necessary to support AI, e.g. improving understanding of fact-checking, combatting over-reliance, security and privacy awareness, etc
3. What is your desired outcome on the shape of the workforce from the introduction of AI in your organisation given potential changes in productivity from AI?

These are just some of the questions you might ask yourself about the use of AI in your business.

To explore ideas further contact:

Dr Andrew Rogoyski,

Director of Innovation, Surrey Institute for People Centred AI, University of Surrey,

IoD Surrey and Berkshire Artificial Intelligence Ambassador