Perspective

Leveling up the AI center of excellence

A holistic, all-in approach to the intelligent enterprise

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To get the most from an AI center of excellence, companies need to stop making small bets and go all in. Say goodbye to ad hoc initiatives and tentative point solutions. Commit instead to a holistic approach that enables an intelligent enterprise at scale.

It’s time to move from ad hoc to all in
Artificial intelligence (AI), data, and analytics are central to all strategic imperatives. Organizations aspire to embed them in their business decisions and make their businesses more intelligent. Yet sustained and broad-based success has been sparse.

In our experience, a persistent issue is the model of AI adoption. Often, business leaders take an anecdotal, need-based approach to AI when they should be taking a holistic, all-in approach instead.

An intelligent enterprise has AI embedded into its business

An intelligent enterprise is an organization that consistently bases its decisions on data-driven insights. One of the key enablers of such organizations is an AI center of excellence (CoE). An AI CoE is embedded and close to the strategic business imperative and delivers measurable outcomes continuously.

An AI CoE can deliver an intelligent enterprise

AI isn’t one and done. Most data or analytics modernization efforts take place in one large implementation. However, AI efforts are a series of implementations bringing together multiple technologies across value streams.

AI implementations need to address a set of use cases catering to the interconnections among business functions. By embedding it in the businesses, AI becomes the way to work (and not just an intervention), forming the basis of a scaled intelligent enterprise.

Should AI be centralized or federated?

As AI gets closer to the core of the enterprise, standardization and governance needs increase. That makes centralization of analytics and AI helpful to organizations that can cross-leverage resources, talent, and technologies. That said, function and industry-specific nuances should be carefully embedded into the CoE.

An AI CoE functions best when aligned to the organizational matrix. The key here is to strike the right balance between centralization of a function and organizational flexibility.

The AI CoE in action

AI CoEs will continue to evolve

With AI becoming more mainstream, AI initiatives will become increasingly multidisciplinary, and the focus will continue shifting to high-value use cases that go to the heart of the company’s enterprise value. Therefore, AI infrastructure is key.

As you would with any other investment, create a portfolio of opportunities—in this scenario, a use-case backlog—and methodically deploy AI against it. Then manage and nurture this use-case backlog with a CoE where the “E” stands for excellence, not experimentation.

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