Introducing Your Digital Workforce …

Generative AI — The Biggest Leap Since the Web

Just as the first web browsers like Netscape unlocked the power of the internet for mass adoption in the 1990s, innovations like ChatGPT have opened the door to a generative AI-powered future. Much like those earliest websites, ChatGPT offers a glimpse of transformative possibilities ahead.

For business leaders, failing to recognize its significance now could mean getting left behind as generative AI reshapes industries, just as the internet did decades ago.

For mid-market companies, generative AI represents a rare chance to gain an edge over larger competitors. Exponential technologies like generative AI enabling a new digital workforce while augmenting your existing talent pool finally provide the means to advance simultaneous innovation and exploitation capabilities smoothly, scaling cost-effective growth— the ability to become ambidextrous leaders.

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can learn and generate new content and innovations rather than follow programmed rules. Digital workers are intelligent software bots capable of automating business processes end-to-end, enhancing creativity and innovation, and with new digital products and experiences, enriching your ability to engage in new differentiated ways with a growing customer base. These technologies are revolutionizing operational and managerial work, improving strategic decision-making, and, crucially, accelerating and automating "change" work required for executing new strategic intent.

Challenges Facing Mid-Market Companies

Company X, a $200 million manufacturing firm, had aimed to roll out an industry 4.0 initiative to grow their customer base and, in parallel, modernize their operations. However, after two years of effort, they had only completed pilot projects in 2 of their six plants. They failed to address their target growth strategies due to the disruptive nature of the change to their existing operations. Their digital transformation needed a new approach and more steam.

Like Company X, many mid-market companies struggle due to:

- Limited budgets and resources

- Gaps recruiting top AI and technology talent

- Outdated legacy IT systems

- Risk aversion and lengthy cycles for adopting new technology

Particularly for SME organizations with constrained resources, there is no room to get these digital transformation initiatives wrong. A poor decision can prove fatal, especially in an exponentially changing world, akin to a Formula One race, where it's almost impossible to recover from a failed experiment or poorly executed strategy. These challenges leave SMEs vulnerable to falling further behind despite their apparent agility — just as companies of all sizes unable to embrace the internet transformation saw their competitive standing fade two decades ago.

The Transformative Potential of Generative AI

While traditional linear change technology adoption approaches have generally failed leaders, working with constrained current systems while in parallel struggling to implement new capabilities, a clear roadmap, when combined with exponential advances like generative AI and digital workers, can reshape mid-market companies' growth trajectories, just as the internet radically reshaped business landscapes in the 1990s.

Limitations exist. Generative AI still requires human oversight and lacks full context and judgment capabilities. But for many well-defined tasks across the entire value chain, it can far surpass human output with higher quality and speed, opening new possibilities for growth and efficiency, much as the early commercial internet did.

By combining the strengths of humans and AI, these technologies enable scaleable and differentiated growth-centric strategies:

• Enabling new products and experiences to differentiate against competition and engage your growing customer base in new ways
• Simulating innovative new product services and experience scenarios for forecasting and testing innovations and cost-effectively scaling winners
• Personalizing customer experiences based on AI-generated recommendations without increasing your headcount
• Producing detailed content variations for marketing at scale
• Automating repetitive back-office tasks like data entry, reporting, compliance, finance, procurement and administration
• Remain responsive, flexible, and adaptive as you grow and lead your market and as conditions constantly evolve.

Rather than replacing workers, AI augments them by taking over tedious, rules-based work. Instead of hiring a new administrative headcount to support your growth strategy, your in-place digital workforce can scale, within reason, infinatly with marginal cost. Intelligent automation empowers people to focus on higher judgment creative tasks, just as the first websites allowed companies to engage customers in new ways.

As we can see, with the introduction of Generative AI, new possibilities exist for digital transformation, increasing success rates presently set as low as 10%. For example, introducing a digital workforce will significantly change your original change strategy, how you get there, your start conditions, and expected outcomes. Digital workers across this change continuum bring you new capabilities, like intelligent automation and talent augmentation, that you would otherwise find impossible to attract and retain. With these enhanced capabilities to address change, one of your most significant constraints, your talent pool, can significantly increase your probability of achieving successful digital growth.

By integrating digital workers into their operations and change programs, mid-market firms overcome one of their greatest constraints — talent and capacity. With a digital workforce, they can punch above their weight class in digital prowess and become dominant players in the AI era, much like Amazon and Google did by leveraging the early commercial internet.

Call to Action for Leaders

Mid-market companies can leapfrog ahead by taking these steps:

1. Audit processes to identify where digital workers can drive growth and automate and augment tasks on operational and change processes. Start with a narrow, high-impact use case. No significant investment is needed — begin exploring with readily available AI tools like ChatGPT.
2. Implement in bite-sized pilots, working from a foundation you can build and compound upon, measure results, and scale. Partner with Data and AI experts if there is a need for more data science resources in-house. The lift is lighter than you think.
3. Continuously re-evaluate to expand the scope as capabilities advance. As your digital and human workforce becomes increasingly capable, conditions and opportunities change. There is no need to boil the ocean — incremental steps with continuous learning get you there faster.
4. Align leaders at all levels on the vision to integrate AI, deploy digital workers, and train your talent pool smoothly. Change management is critical — inspire and upskill workers to adopt the hybrid human-AI model.

Don't have the perfect strategy? No problem. The technology is new — but the time for action is now. Prioritize speed over perfection. Move ahead incrementally and course correct. Even modest initial investments lay the foundations for transformative impact over time.

Just as the commercial internet saw meteoric adoption with the proper guidance, Generative AI can rapidly augment your workforce's capabilities starting today. Small starts lead to outsized results — act now before the market leaves you behind. Employ your digital workers and secure your competitive edge for the AI-powered future.

Rethink Your Digital Transformation Strategy Today

The emergence of generative AI today parallels the rise of the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Early adopters who saw the potential of these digital technologies and moved quickly ultimately reaped the greatest rewards.

Mid-market companies now face a similar generational inflection point. Will they dismiss generative AI as hype before grasping its full capabilities? Or will they move boldly and early as Netscape, Amazon, and Google did with the fledgling internet, securing dominant positions for decades ahead?

Leaders of SMEs can ensure their companies emerge ahead of their competitors with the right vision and urgency. The coming AI-powered shift will be no less revolutionary than the internet's impact. By harnessing generative AI's potential now, forward-thinking organizations can build their digital future today and transform themselves into market leaders for the next era of exponential change.

This world is changing so fast. But we can start now. In my next posts, we will continue to explore engaging and deploying a digital workforce as a critical part of our digital transformation enablement. Please subscribe to keep ahead.