Finding 35% in productivity increase opportunities with an AI roadmap

How we partnered with a 40 person company to roadmap and create an AI adoption strategy in order to increase productivity.

Background

As a business who had been around for 12 years operating in a high ticket industrial retail space - the senior leadership team felt that given the nature of repeat low-level tasks conducted by the bulk of their staff - they could benefit from adopting AI and other automation technologies - in order to improve productivity and remain competitive without adding headcount.

With no in-house IT expertise, let alone AI - understanding the possibilities and limitations that AI could deliver was an difficult task. They had historically been late adopters to new technology - and whilst headlines on AI and were enticing - had previously had bad experiences with over-promising and under-delivering when it came to emerging technology - and finding real, tangible value was absolutely paramount.

Bringing in everyone

We began discovery by assessing their structure bucketed into functions, looking at the cross-collaboration/dependencies between each function and assessing their day-to-day task load in terms of time taken and value created along with common blockers or delays that were linked to dependencies either on other teams or external third parties.

This was done by sending out a short survey to each team member in order to collate feedback in a fast and effective async manner, allowing mass feedback as it suited team members - whilst ensuring we had statistically significant data rather than relying on a single stakeholder within a team.

Mapping for value

For the practical adoption of AI across the business - we created a matrix based for each function, including the aforementioned breakdowns - mapped to specific value created by each task.

Each task was then assessed for it’s portability, with a ranging scale from partial to complete automation via AI - along with suggested solutions from the following categories:

• Single “off the shelf” vendor: Using a single platform in order to complete the task at hand - often the cheapest and most effective option where there is a 100% overlap of the task and what is offered by the vendor - such using an AI expense management tool to automatically reconcile payable invoices from their email accounts - with limited human intervention needed.
• Integrated multi-vendor solution: Integrating together multiple software vendors - for example integrating their existing CRM system along with AI sales outreach tooling in order to achieve a viable solution.
• Custom development: Building custom AI tooling in order to support in areas where existing off the shelf software vendors could not.

Each of the suggested solutions were costed, third party vendor assessed according to client requirements and then again mapped to expected ROI across a series 12, 18, 24, 36 and 60 month terms - along with any caveats or risks - at a task and aggregated level.

Roadmap delivery

The findings were then distilled into a multi-year roadmap, built to be easily understood even by those with limited exposure to IT investment - along with flexibility to adopt specific parts as required.

A final roadmap was presented to the senior leadership team - where in a 35% increase in productivity across the organisation could be found, with a break even point at just 12 months.