By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service
few weeks ago, I spoke with Amer Iqbal, a sought-after speaker who has spent the last 20 years leading innovation at some of the world’s top companies including as the Head of Digital Transformation, APAC at Meta and Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation at Deloitte Digital on the UNSCRIPTED podcast. The topic was around overall innovation, but of course AI came up.
What was interesting is Amer’s observation that everyone knows they need to be ‘doing something’ with AI, but the steps being taken by the majority are not as strategic as they could or should be, at least thus far. He explains that the AI investment he sees is being done because companies know they must take action and are focused on finding areas of low-hanging fruit by way of applying AI to inefficiencies.
While this isn’t bad in any way, his advice is to think bigger than just efficiency. “AI is absolutely the number one topic that clients are asking us about these days. What we're seeing is a lot of the hype around AI is about how to do today's business better, how to do things more efficiently, find some cost savings,” Amer explains. “These are just examples of how we do exactly what we have been doing, but with a little bit of automation on top.”
Amer points back to the industrial revolution, when people would burn coal to create steam that spins a turbine to run factories. When electricity was invented and could replace coal and steam, it wasn’t until quite some time later that factories were redesigned to make use of the invention and really change the way of working. “It took a really long time between the innovation occurring and people actually harnessing it,” he says, “and that’s similar to what we’re seeing with AI right now.”
A 3-Phase AI Strategy
With that example in mind, the explosion of generative AI with ChatGPT is relatively recent – so it makes sense that companies are still grappling with exactly what to do with this technological innovation. “If I’m being honest, most of the requests that come in are from individuals saying, ‘I’ve been given a mandate that I need to spend 5% or 10% of my budget this year on something to do with AI – what should I do?’” Amer shares.
His advice is to consider a three-phase framework starting with, but not limiting yourself to, efficiency. “AI is a great efficiency driver, but I think that’s just the easy wins,” Amer explains. “So, find those efficiencies and cost savings, but then where it gets more interesting is when you look beyond efficiency to growth. And what’s even more exiting is transformation – building the businesses of tomorrow.” He suggests:
- Efficiency First: Start with quick wins in automation and cost savings focused on how to do today's business better. This is where you look for opportunities to apply AI to gain efficiency, automate manual tasks, leverage knowledge better, and more.
- Growth Focus: It would be a mistake to stop at gaining efficiency with AI. Consider how you can leverage AI to remove human capacity constraints. Ask questions such as, how would we grow our business knowing what we know about AI? What would growth look like in a world where we have unconstrained capacity?
- Transformation: What Amer is most excited about is how companies can reimagine their entire business model with AI capabilities "Efficiency and growth are great for driving your core business and maybe even some adjacencies, but what about building the business of tomorrow?" Amer says. “Consider: what would our business look like if we redesigned it today, knowing what we know about AI?" This question, he suggests, should be at the heart of every leadership team's strategic planning.
The New York Times Lesson in Innovation
Amer and I spoke about how the New York Times provides a masterclass in maintaining core value proposition while transforming delivery methods for the digital age. “Anyone can look at what Apple is doing, but it's more interesting when you look at more traditional companies and how they're innovating,” he says. “One of the ones that's in our book and one of my favorites because it's such a traditional industry is The New York Times. In one of the most old-school and most traditional industries on the planet, they have absolutely bucked the trend. In an industry where fewer than 10% of Americans still read newspapers, the Times has grown to over 10 million subscribers – five times their peak print circulation.”
The New York Times focused on identifying and protecting what truly matters (in their case, quality journalism) while being flexible about how it's delivered and open to change in processes, workflow, and use of technology. Amer says that they pay their journalists well and give them freedom and respect to do their jobs with autonomy but have welcomed the need to find new ways for journalists to express themselves, such as through podcasts and new subscription models.
The New York Times embraced AI tools for efficiency while setting clear boundaries to protect their core product's integrity. “They have approved the use of best-in-class tools like Copilot, Notebook, LM, ChatGPT, etcetera and they've also built some internal tools,” says Amer. “But my favorite thing is they've set some guidelines. Employees can use AI to generate SEO headlines, summaries, suggest edits, etcetera, but can't use AI to generate images or videos. They're outlining a playbook now that I think more and more companies are going to have to get used to, playing in this kind of gray area when it comes to AI. We can no longer say this is okay, this is not okay, whitelist and blacklists or whatever you want to call it. Increasingly, there's going to be more of a gray area. We're already seeing fewer than 30% of companies in America have officially adopted AI tools, and yet 75% of employees are using AI at work. What that means is people are bringing ChatGPT, their personal subscriptions or whatever to work whether you like it or not. So, people are going to use it, and I love to see companies in traditional industries that are embracing that ambiguity and leading from the front of their industry.”