The Artificial Intelligence Business Essence Program
Program Overview:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the same revolutionary potential today that the internet had in the 90s and 2000s. It is a powerful general-purpose technology which is set to transform every industry, organization, product and process. It is already impacting everything from diagnosing diseases to maintaining equipment, from customer engagement to the way you shop, from recruiting talent to marketing and sales. During the next 10-20 years as the full potential of AI unfolds, the effects that can already be seen today will only be magnified. The time to act is now while you can still gain an edge over your competitors.
This program gives leaders, executives and functional experts the strategic understanding and concrete tools they need to analyze how AI will affect their industry and how they can apply AI to their specific business context.
You do NOT need to have any technical knowledge to attend this course! It is a hands-on, non-technical introduction that cuts through the hype. We use case studies, examples, applications, video documentations and live and recorded Q&As with experts from across the entire value chain and various industries.
In all strategic questions, the Why determines the How. This also holds true for the way you use AI in your company. Or in other words: Your AI strategy and projects have to be a derivative of your overall strategy. The AI Business Essence Program teaches you how to get from one to the other.
In the concluding part of the workshop, the focus shifts to the concrete ‘how-to’ and we work through the 5 key aspects of how to get started in a systematic way.
Overall, we combine a ‘how-do-I-use-it-on-Monday’ approach with rigorous analysis and a strategic perspective. The ultimate goal is that you go back to your job feeling confident about what to do next, with a customized, actionable plan in your pocket and a vision in your head.
Participant Profile:
- Leaders and decision-makers in companies who are considering if and are wondering how to use AI in their company
- Strategists who want to learn more about how AI is changing the competitive landscape of their industry
- Managers whose company is already applying some AI tools and who want to gain a better understanding of it
- Experts in the field of AI who want to gain insights on possible applications of their algorithms, tools and skills in industry
Program Content and Approach:
Artificial Intelligence is the topic of the day. Many think it is set to change entire industries if not the basis of our societies. If they have not done it yet, many countries and companies are rushing to develop an AI strategy.
But is it all just a hype? What can realistically be expected of AI today and tomorrow? And, more pragmatically, how do you build it into your overall strategy?
At the heart of the program are the following questions:
- What is AI (and what is it not) and how does it work?
- What can realistically be expected from AI technologies today and in the near future?
- What are the best examples of how AI is already being used in other industries to reduce costs, develop new products and increase sales?
- Which new opportunities does AI open up to generate value?
- Which prices are in process of being changed by an order of magnitude by AI and how will this change the face of your industry? How will competitive dynamics change and how can you prepare for that?
- How can AI tools be used to improve or totally reinvent the customer experience?
- Which processes and tasks can be automated using AI applications?
- How can business decisions be improved using AI?
- How do machines learn from data? How do AI algorithms work and how do they differ from traditional approaches of mining data?
- When is AI not a good solution yet and you should rather stick with what you have or search for the right human to do the job?
- How can AI be made productive for medium-sized companies which do not have deep pockets or the requisite IT inhouse-capacities?
- What do you need to be able to brief your data scientists and bridge the gap between business goals and what is technically possible?
- How does AI impact B2B businesses vs. B2C businesses?
To answer these mission-critical strategic questions you don’t need to know what a Bellman Equation or a Markov-Decision-Process is. Therefore, technical detail is only included in the program to the extent it is absolutely indispensable to understand the strategic implications of AI.
But what you do need is up-to-the-minute information on current best practices, guidelines for how to use AI in your organization and a framework to think about its strategic implications. This is what the program delivers.
The learning approach is highly interactive and collaborative using a wealth of examples and applications from across the value chain and from various industries covering best-practices as well as potential pitfalls. Through video-examples, facilitated discussions and group work with your peers, working through templates to apply what you learn to your context and real-life in-depth case studies, the concepts come to life.
To further enrich the overall experience, the workshop features live interactions via videoconferencing with entrepreneurs, programmers and experts who work on the cutting edge of developing AI applications.
Module structure:
Part 1: Overview
There are so many technological and strategic changes going on that it is hard to keep track even of the terms popping up, much less their strategic implications. Let us help with that: In the first session we embed the development of AI in the bigger picture of accelerating technological change and digitalization. In particular we look into where AI stands relative to developments like blockchain, Internet of Things, digitalization, big data, intelligent automation (IA), augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud computing, robotic process automation (RBA), edge computing and crowd-x.
Part 2: What is AI? Really?
It is interesting that for a term of such importance there is no clear definition. One of the reasons for this is that there is no clear consensus on how intelligence is to be defined; another one is that the different technologies subsumed under the term are only loose related. For our purposes we define AI as systems that perceive, recognize patterns, learn and predict to ultimately inform or make decisions.
In this module we elaborate the definition more, look into which technologies constitute AI, get a deeper understanding of why it is reaching such prominence now, and also provide some technical background and a basic understanding of how AI learns from data.
Part 3: How AI is changing the competitive landscape of industries.
This session has 7 building blocks. In particular we cover:
Strategic aspects of AI 1 – effects of AI on costs, differentiation and revenue drivers
Strategic aspects of AI 2 – competitors out of the shadow
Strategic aspects of AI 3 – substitutes you never thought of
Strategic aspects of AI 4 – changing business models
Strategic aspects of AI 5 – make or buy, how the efficient boundaries of the firm are changing through AI
Strategic aspects of AI 6 – changing bargaining power in industries
Strategic aspects of AI 7 – the customer engagement paradigm shift
Part 4: Uses of AI applications across the value chain and in various industries.
Uses of AI applications across the value chain and in various industries. In particular we look at applications in the following functions:
- Purchasing
- Product development
- Manufacturing
- Maintenance
- Supply chain management
- Risk management
- Human resources
- Finance
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer engagement
The examples are taken from a wide variety of industries such as manufacturing, finance, retail, health care, utilities, agriculture, mining, construction and services.
Part 5: Key aspects of an AI strategy in your context
Up to this point in the program, we have answered a wide array of questions, provided a wealth of knowledge and brought the concepts to life with examples. In this module we take it to the next level and show you how to apply it in your own context. How does AI influence current and future customers, competition, innovation and value creation in your industry? We cover questions such as:
- How can your existing products and services be enriched by the use of AI?
- How might new products or product categories that where not yet possible be enabled?
- Which processes and tasks could you automate leading to a reduction of costs?
- How can AI fundamentally change trade-offs you are facing between quality, speed and costs?
- How can you make better business decisions by using AI?
The insights you gain from working jointly through these questions lead to a structured process of how to develop an AI-strategy that is well aligned with your overall company strategy. Sometimes your insights about AI might even change your overriding strategy.
Part 6: Making it happen. How to get started in a systematic and structured way.
In this next and final step, we guide you through a template that shows you how to isolate the AI projects with the highest impact given your specific situation and context. You will not find this template anywhere else.
We also cover
- Pre-requisites to be able to apply AI in a value-creating way in your company
- When to use packaged solutions instead of a highly customized and innovative solution
- The AI-Canvas as a tool to structure AI-projects
- Vendor selection
- Bottlenecks and implementation challenges
- Implementation challenges to expect and potential pitfalls to look out for
- Risks in using AI (black box phenomenon, overfitting, biases in data, historical data for prediction, etc.)
Part 7: Your questions
Once we reach this part of the program many of your questions will have already been answered. But you have the possibility to send in questions you would like to see covered before the start of the program and insofar these have not yet been addressed, we will do this here. We also keep a ‘theme park’ during the program where all questions that might lead to topics in another module are collected. These also get answered in this module.
The AI Business Essence workshop is a living program that is constantly updated. Therefore, the content and order of subjects might be subject to change.
The AI Business Essence Workshop can be booked as a customized in-house solution for your company too. This is an excellent tool to develop an individual, applicable, concrete plan on how to use AI for your company while further increasing your internal knowledge base. Please check here for a closer description.