Chapter 2
Jas Bassi
Gateley
Reuben Boughton
GW
James Hobbs
HSBC
Mike Lewis
WMGC
Mike Morgan
Hays
Vinay Parmar
Curo
Dr Sudheer Parwana
PwC
Prof. Abdul Hamid Sadka
Aston Uni
Mark Simpson
GW
Peter Wainwright
ERIKS
We took a deep dive into the topic of AI and Automation with a focus on How Enterprises can best utilise new technology to help both the back and front office functionalities in their businesses.
We covered three core areas with our Technology Leaders:
What are the current opportunities for enterprises?
What are the threats that enterprises need to be aware of?
What are the fundamental guardrails that can help safeguard your IT estate?
To gain real-time insights, the board sought feedback from Tech Leaders within the region. We aimed to align our efforts and uncover what accelerates IT teams, enhances efficiency, and sets us apart.
Our second chapter of was hosted by GW (Griffiths Waite) at their offices in the Centre City Building, Birmingham.
We wanted to explore the opportunities currently that AI and Automation presents for enterprises in the UK. A simple way of doing this was to utilise Gartner’s recent opportunity radar model and the thousands of use cases available to us from across the globe.
We studied use cases from over 20 white papers from across the globe. Again, utilising Gartner’s model, we split the use cases into 4 easily explainable sections:
Customer Experience, Sales and Marketing and Customer Services.
AI Enhanced Products and Value Proposition.
Admin, legal, HR, Finance, IT and Software.
Research and Development, Supply Chain and Operations.
After analysing the use cases, we then divided them into the separate areas using quadrants.
We then tasked our technology leaders to move the use cases around the radar to create meaning. The idea was to use their existing knowledge and work together to create a hierarchy of importance for the individual use cases.
The closer the use case to the centre of the radar the more value it holds in enterprise business.
To create further meaning we wanted our technology leaders to use their unique insights to show what they were currently utilising from a use case perspective within their businesses.
Each leader had 4 green stickers, 4 orange stickers and 4 red stickers:
Utilising now and creating efficiencies.
On our radar and in the research phase.
We have researched, considered, and currently don’t feel it adds value to our IT function.
You can view these stickers in the above quadrants or view the full radar here.
Open the radar
This is where we convey the hot takes and use cases that could create significant change for your enterprises.
We see conversational chat as a key opportunity, but there's hesitation in moving it to customer-facing roles. However, if implemented with proper guardrails, it could greatly benefit enterprises.
GitHub Copilot & ChatGPT are ground-breaking code assistants utilising AI. It can and should be revolutionising your coding experience.
We combined these use cases, which offer a big competitive edge & cost savings. We would advise that you start exploring these immediately.
Our group are already seeing the benefits and efficiencies associated with AI content creation. Meaning if you aren’t, you really should be.
This was an area that was deemed industry niche, beneficial to one of our group but overall deemed hype as opposed to widely beneficial.
Our leaders were all utilising this use case and seeing the benefits, albeit not a business critical function.
Conclusion
Uniformly we all agreed that every business was a technology business and the lens that we should see AI through is, its in our toolbox. It’s a creative efficiency tool that when utilised with the right guardrails, big data, tech and people will enhance every offering.
What we are all searching for is those guardrails for our businesses and business cases to develop even further how we can increase efficiencies and effectiveness.
Some questions to think about...
How is your IT department incorporating AI?
What are your biggest opportunities?
What are your concerns?
We’d love to hear your feedback.
#Birminghtechleaders
If you have any questions or queries please contact one of our Board Members:
Reuben Boughton
