Complete These 8 Activities to be in the Top Quartile of GenAI Company Adoption
Benchmark your organization to see where you stand versus leaders
Many companies have been asking us about ways to benchmark their GenAI investment. Despite the massive press coverage, the reality is that the vast majority of organizations have only recently assigned priorities, leaders, and budgets related to GenAI. From our research, work with customers, and interactions with our 3,000-member community, we developed this simple checklist to determine whether your organization is in the top quartile of GenAI adoption as of Q1 2024.
(These steps are from our more comprehensive GenAI Maturity Model and, yes, this threshold will be higher next year.)
1. A one-hour review with the Board of Directors about GenAI opportunities and threats: Allocate a minimum of one hour for executive management and the board to delve into GenAI's potential impact on your business. Companies have found our WINS framework useful to determine industry and company urgency (or non-urgency).
2. The CEO and each VP must personally spend 3 hours using ChatGPT: You would not hire a VP who has never used a browser, nor would you allow a VP to opine on software development priorities who has not used the internet. The same is true for GenAI. CEOs/CxOs/SVPs/VPs will understand the transformative power of this technology by actually using the product for a use case (business or personal) that they understand well.
3. Assess legal and IT risks: Ensure your legal and IT departments research and present to management a risk assessment around GenAI. OpenAI faces an estimated $20B in lawsuits for alleged illegal activity in gathering training data, and these lawsuits could extend to users of ChatGPT. Because of this risk, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others have indemnified firms that use their LLM solutions. Assess your own legal (lawsuits, IP, brand, etc.) and security risks.
4. Assign an executive for GenAI coordination: Designate an executive responsible for overseeing GenAI integration, center of excellence, and project coordination to ensure strategic and tactical cohesion. This will help management stay focused as GenAI changes and interest by investors will not slow down in 2024.
5. Publish a basic Employee Use Policy and train 100 employees: Don’t ban ChatGPT as your employees are already using it. Employees want to use this technology responsibly. Publish a written employee use policy (name which tools are approved and what information not to enter). Conduct a 90-minute basic training for 100 employees or 5% of your workforce.
6. Build a zero-risk chatbot pilot with public company data to start learning: Construct a no-risk chatbot pilot using public data from your own website. No-code solutions from OpenAI, CustomGPT, ChatBase, Allitus, Relevance AI, and others start at less than $500/month. Users simply upload PDFs, Word documents, and URLs. Hands-on learning with your data, in a zero-risk environment, starts the critical process of organizational learning.
7. Identify and support your GenAI enthusiasts: The top employee talent in your organization already knows that GenAI is the biggest career accelerant ever. The sweet spot for value-add is the Venn diagram overlap between understanding GenAI and company-specific use cases. Identify and encourage your GenAI early adopters with small budgets, accolades, and quarterly summaries of company-specific use cases.
8. Create a process for GenAI project identification and classification: Studies have shown that employee productivity can improve by 10-40% and that processes like customer support have 5-20% cost savings opportunities. Hundreds of opportunities exist at your firm, and your motivated employees will identify the best ones.
You are likely doing some of these already. By completing the rest, you will have confidence that you are in the top quartile of companies as of Q1 2024. The journey to the top of a mountain begins with the first steps. Take your first steps toward organizational transformation for competitive advantage with GenAI this quarter.
Please let me know if you are using Microsoft 365 with Co-Pilot (Word, PowerPoint, etc.). We are very interested in your experience. Microsoft is ahead of Google in integrating and rolling out LLM for office personal productivity apps.
Congrats to Dr. John Sviokla:
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Notable upcoming events
Jan 22 )TONIGHT): Implementing Enterprise-save GenAI with RAG (virtual, free) by Lucinda Linde. GAI Insights AI Learning Lab. 7p EST. Sign up here.
Jan 31: Noon EST (virtual, free) Case study of why one team at MIT chose a no-code LLM solution from CustomGPT for meet a pressing need. Register here
Apr 8 (all day - in person; free): The Future of Business with AI at MIT Media Lab. Last year, speakers included Sam Altman from OpenAI, Vinod Khosla, Lex Fridman, Stephen Wolfram, etc. Registration now OPEN.
May 7: (in person) Harvard Business School GenAI Conference.
Oct 7-8 (2 days. in-person, paid): Generative AI World 2024 in Boston, MA. This is our flagship annual conference.
“He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows or judge all he sees.” - Ben Franklin
Onward,
Paul