Four Steps For Building An AI Center Of Excellence
By Anand Mahurkar, CEO, Findability.Sciences.
The pandemic has left many businesses in a scramble. A recession seems imminent as inflation and supply chain issues continue to confound—and as organizations are forced to look at their business models and check how technology can improve their processes and increase productivity.
These challenges are why digital transformation will continue to be a top priority for many enterprises in the coming year. The ability of a company to adapt to new technology will be highly critical, especially in these challenging times. In the words of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: “It’s time to batten down the hatches.”
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been a windfall for enterprises as the technology allows organizations to improve their processes, increase speed and accuracy, automate specific procedures and provide high-quality output. Therefore, AI will be integral to an organization’s growth and digital transformation in 2023 and beyond.
While an AI journey can be a truly transformative experience for an enterprise, in order for such a process to be a smooth one, an organization needs to have a “hands-on deck approach.” This means the AI program is not just a project for AIOps teams or software engineers, but rather for everyone in the organization.
An integral step involved in starting an AI journey is to create a center of excellence, or COE.
Here is why a COE is so crucial for an AI program: Ultimately, AI needs to be handled by people of multiple specialties in and around the company. This is because an AI implementation requires an organization to centralize its data infrastructure, which in turn requires input and guidance from multiple departments.
Conversely, it is no secret that “data fiefdoms or silos” exist within the enterprise—where certain departments may control or even hoard its data. Before an AI program can be implemented, the AI solution provider and data team must demand that all relevant company data is to be democratized, centralized and used for a common purpose.
That is when painful decisions (and protests) may prevail. Therefore, establishing a COE with people from different departments is essential.
Here are four ways a COE can help the organization implement and succeed in its AI journey.