When looking to sell your company one day, show you have a plan for leveraging technologies, otherwise they will manage you
Here’s the bottom line on Artificial Intelligence….it could be a great tool for your company, but it’s just a means to an end. Focus first and foremost on your strategic end need and then go back and decide what technology will get you there.
Today, the companies making good progress leveraging AI tools are those that know what strategic improvements they want to make with their company and then determine where AI or other emerging technologies could enable them. But what you want to avoid is just assuming that AI is for you and start down a rabbit hole of time and investment only to ultimately reach an uncertain outcome for your business.
Here are some great questions to sit with your team to discuss first what your company strategic need or opportunity is:
- When we think about where our business is today and where we want it to be 3, 5, 7 or more years from now, what is the gap and what technology might help you close it?
- What is our business over-arching strategic need for this year – do we need more revenue, better fulfillment of the revenue we already get and/or do we need to deliver a better customer experience? Are you aligned as a team around what the strategic priority is amongst these three primary options?
- What is our current selling model, our fulfillment model and our customer experience that we deliver and which would enable our productivity and growth the most by leveraging a technology?
- As we look at our company expense line items, what are the major ones that warrant a review for efficiency or productivity gains? Where might a technology help us become more efficient or productive?
- What are the various technologies we see emerging (slowly or rapidly) in our industry? (i.e.: additive manufacturing, robotics, AI, Augmented/Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, etc.)
- Where do we see our customers embracing new technology?
- Where do we see competitors leveraging new technology?
- Are there any areas of our company where we aren’t doing the basics well? (A technology may or may not fix a bad process, often times the process needs to be manually fixed before it can be moved to a technology based solution).
We encourage every business owner/CEO to have excellent internal and external situational awareness to know where evolving technologies can enable their company worth growth. But the key is to avoid first focusing on a technology, focus first on what your company strategic need or opportunity is. Then once this is clear, look to one or more technologies as simply a tool…they are a means to an end, not the end game by themselves.
