Why Create an AI-Focused Center of Excellence (aka AICOE)?
Artificial intelligence is now a permanent feature of the modern business landscape and AI capabilities need to be sustainable over time to develop and support potential new business models and capabilities. Investment in AI and the measurement of AI’s contribution to key performance outcomes - e.g. cost savings, increased revenue, and greater overall company valuation - needs to be managed, understood, and continuously measured, analyzed and (re)directed as technology innovation and business needs evolve.
An AICOE can help a company leverage the potential of AI by aligning AI initiatives with business strategy and objectives, coordinating critical expertise and knowledge, prioritizing and allocating resources, managing risks, and ensuring scalability, efficiency, sustainability, while delivering ethical AI solutions that deliver real and measurable business value.
An AICOE is a centralized, cross-disciplinary team of experts and stakeholders that provides leadership, guidance, and support for the organization’s AI initiatives. Its main goal is to ensure that the company is maximizing the potential return from its investment in AI. Primary benefits include:
- Strategic alignment: AI is rapidly evolving and has the potential to disrupt industries and businesses, but there is still a great deal of misunderstanding and uncertainty, and as we’ve seen, AI research, technology and capabilities are evolving at unprecedented speeds. An AICOE can ensure that the company's AI initiatives align with its business objectives, helping the organization to stay competitive and innovative.
- Capabilities development: Implementing AI requires specialized expertise in areas such as data science, analytics, machine learning, operations and natural language processing. An AICOE can provide this expertise, helping the organization to not just implement AI initiatives effectively, but also provide ongoing oversight in machine learning operations to ensure the model continues to perform as expected.
- Resource prioritization: An AICOE can help the company to identify the most promising AI use cases and prioritize them based on the potential impact on the business. This can help to allocate resources effectively and ensure that the organization is maximizing those resources.
- Governance: AI can pose ethical, legal, and regulatory challenges. An AICOE should develop policies and guidelines to ensure that the organization is using AI ethically and responsibly, reducing the risk of potential damage to users or corporate reputation.
- Enterprise scalability: An AICOE can help the company to develop a scalable and sustainable AI infrastructure that can support the organization's long-term AI initiatives. This can include developing best practices, selecting appropriate tools and platforms, and providing ongoing support and training.
For the full white paper and checklist, download the 'Unleashing the Potential of AI: Establishing an AI Center of Excellence for Sustainable AI Transformation'
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