Find the Right Pace for Your AI Rollout
Implementing AI can introduce disruptive change and disfranchise staff and employees. When members are reluctant to adopt a new technology, they might hesitate to use it, push back against its deployment, or use it in limited capacity — which affects the benefits an organization gains from using it in the first place. Organizations often don’t see the problems coming, and rollout a new tool too quickly only for it to run into major barriers. To navigate this process, we propose a three-step approach: 1) assess the impact of an AI solution, 2) identify barriers to adoption, and 3) identify the appropriate pace.
Machine learning, deep learning, and other artificial intelligence technologies promise to significantly reshape the workplace. They can reduce redundant tasks, automate work, and improve organizational capabilities. Yet for most companies, the potential of these technologies is still out of reach. As a recent census study shows, less than 7% of organizations have adopted AI technologies. Why?
Based on our ongoing research with dozens of companies, AI solutions most frequently fail to gain adoption because leaders worry how the deployment of AI might affect their company. They fear the new technology might displace work, disrupt workplace dynamics, or require new skills to master, and they hesitate.
These aren’t unfounded anxieties. Implementing AI can introduce disruptive change and disfranchise staff and employees. When members are reluctant to adopt a new technology, they might hesitate to use it, push back against its deployment, or use it in limited capacity — which affects the benefits an organization gains from using it in the first place. Organizations often don’t see the problems coming, because affected employees do not always share their true views and concerns with managers upfront.
But walking up to the edge of deploying new technology only to lose your nerve — wasting time and resources — isn’t the solution. Rather, leaders need to strategically pace the deployment of AI technologies. Too often, organizations spend significant resources developing or acquiring transformative innovations, but don’t think enough about how to successfully deploy them.
To navigate this process, we propose a three-step approach to find the strategic pace that will allow companies to achieve the benefits of AI solutions without enduring the pain of a mismanaged deployment. It will do so by helping leaders understand who within an organization might be affected by an AI solution, and unpack affected employees’ ability and willingness to adopt a given solution.
Companies often struggle to figure out who will be impacted by an AI solution. They typically conduct broad surveys or ask managers to guess who will be impacted, but our research suggests these efforts aren’t sufficient and often overlook critical components. Instead, they need to get into the weeds to determine which tasks and roles a given AI solution will change, and what the impact will be. Once that’s established, it will be easier to decide what kind of pacing strategy makes sense.
In order to plan for how an AI solution might change, you need to understand which tasks it will touch. That requires first mapping how processes are done now, and then talking with vendors about how they will likely change. Companies should push vendors for detailed specifications of their AI solution and which tasks might be impacted by their solution. This sometimes requires asking hard questions of vendors: “Where have you failed to successful deploy this technology?” “Why did that deployment fail?” Vendors should act as partners in figuring out how a given solution might affect the tasks their employees conduct.
The point of this exercise is to grasp how an AI might replace or alter existing tasks, or introduce new tasks or processes. Identifying new tasks is especially critical, as failure to account for these tasks may impact your organization’s ability to deploy AI.
