Building A Robust AI Strategy with Nishant Pradhan

Question - From the viewpoint of a CAIO, what are some critical considerations when designing and implementing a robust AI strategy within an organisation?

Ans- There is lot of talk about AI outside & within every organization and hence the expectations from a Chief AI Officer are a lot at this point of time. The first step as a CAIO should be to meet every stakeholder and understand their expectations around AI and clarify what it actually means and how can it help. This is very crucial to get everyone aligned towards your AI goals for the organisation.

These days everyone is excited about AI and hence there will be a lot of asks from every stakeholder. The next key step is in coming up with a AI charter & roadmap for the long term. You need to include all perspectives but build a robust prioritization framework for the use cases. Not everything can be done on day one and not everything is that critical for the organization. Keeping all stakeholders engaged is very important.

Every organisation needs to have its own AI strategy and there is no standard formulae. That’s because every organisation has a different baseline in terms of their Infra capability, people skills, growth trajectory, nature of business, and hence the AI strategy for every organisation needs to be crafted by considering various points of view like their Business goals, diversity of uses cases, complexity of Business, data sensitivity, regulatory hurdles, etc. Everything can’t happen on day one and there needs to be a long term vision along with short term deliverables to demonstrate progress to all stakeholders.

Since AI work requires niche skills, building an inhouse team of specialists is very critical for this department. Everyone looks up to this AI team within any organization. This team is required to educate everyone around AI concepts. Hence building a strong team is non-negotiable. There will also be a need for suitable partners and vendors and hence a deep understanding of the AI vendor landscape is very important. Getting right partners on board can help in building AI platform and especially Gen AI platform in quick time.

Finally, AI work is all about the use case and the value add from AI to Business. Hence understanding the Business domain in depth, converting business problems into modelling goals, demonstrating value from AI models in monetary terms are most important skills expected from a CAIO. As long as your AI strategy is meeting Business goals from time to time, you’ll succeed as a CAIO in any organisation.


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