Adopting Artifical Intelligence for commercial growth

In today's dynamic business landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal force, offering many opportunities for commercial growth. Rather than replacing human capabilities, AI is positioned as a powerful tool to enhance decision-making, creativity, and efficiency. Thoughtworks has been doing this kind of work well before the current hype phase: our work in interactive AI that empowers people goes back to 2017. In this post I explore real-world applications, challenges, and success stories that illuminate the impact of AI on operational excellence, transformation and ultimately commercial growth. From our pre-chatGPT work amplifying creativity at Mondeléz International to driving revenue growth at Marimekko, our narrative unfolds how organizations navigate challenges between human ingenuity and AI capabilities for sustainable success in the digital era.

AI has the power to do many things- increase productivity and save time and money, for example. However, AI does not replace humans, but enhances and compliment human capabilities. I champion a human-centric approach to AI tools and techniques to increase commercial growth. AI’s role is to enhance human decision-making, creativity and strategic thinking, which ultimately has the potential to affect commercial growth. AI supports continuous learning for both machines and humans through avenues such as adaptive learning systems, AI-assisted training, machine learning in skill development and more. Within the Jan 2023 Thoughtworks’ whitepaper ‘AI Augmented: a family of modern decision-making approaches’, our AI subject matter experts agree with the premise that an AI enhanced approach produces better outcomes because it enables stakeholders to more effectively align their decision-making with a specific situation.

Mondelez International, one of the largest snack companies in the world, is a prime example of real tangible results from AI enhancement. The snack company has amplified its product development teams with an AI platform to save valuable time for teams to do what AI can’t. Their amplified creativity has yielded amazing results, including faster experimentation and iteration capabilities, leading to better products with reduced time to market.

Not only does AI enhance human capabilities, the technology has the power to transform through operational excellence by streamlining processes, improving efficiency and enabling real-world applications across industries. What does this look like in action? Thoughtworks recently partnered with Bolt.works to help them automate CVs and job ads to match potential jobs with workers. Thoughtworks developed and delivered an AI powered matching engine which made the recruitment process much faster and increased recruiter satisfaction by automating mundane tasks, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. 

Of course, there are challenges in AI adoption; for example, there are ethical considerations. AI systems can unintentionally perpetuate biases present in training data, resulting in unfair outcomes. Ensuring fairness and transparency in AI decision-making is a complex challenge. Whilst working with Bolt.works, Thoughtworks took mitigations to try and ensure that the outputs were as unbiased as possible. We used ChatGPT to extract non-sensitive structured data, and carefully guiding and validating its outputs. Final matching is not done by ChatGPT, but by a model that is completely under our control. This enables us to mitigate biases and, for example, exclude information related to gender and ethnicity. Other mitigations could be to create ethical guidelines for AI development and deployment and regularly audit and assess AI systems for biases. 

Another potential challenge for AI adoption is lack of understanding around AI. Organizations may struggle with a lack of understanding around AI capabilities and limitations. Staff may not be skilled in AI yet and maintaining AI systems does require expertise. However, upskilling and developing your talent will be crucial as the need for broad workforce transformation will continue and organizations should ensure they are not left behind. 

There are clear, tangible benefits and ROI (Return on Investment) value in deploying AI tools. This is exemplified with the case study of Marimmekko, a clothing company that we assisted in implementing a enhancing approach in 2022. Marimekko's digital growth strategy has yielded a 20% YoY revenue increase, surpassing 152 million. The approach we helped Marimekko adopt focuses on enhancing customer experiences and driving growth. The result was a 41% lift in front-page click through and a 24% increase in average revenue per user within five weeks. This shows clear commercial value from adopting AI within their business. 

AI is also changing consumer behaviors and insights and organizations are expected to keep up with these changes. For example, chatbots are altering the customer service experience. AI-powered personalized recommendations mean that customers now expect relevant and tailored adverts. It’s clear that organizations need to keep up with these changing behaviors but how can an organization know where they should be deploying and developing AI capabilities? Forbes argues that streamlining transformation objectives to three or four processes can significantly improve the outcomes of leveraging data and AI. Asking yourselves the following questions can help streamline transformation objectives: who needs a better experience? Are customers demanding a faster process? Is better quality information needed and are you fixing something that is broken? Answering these questions can help determine whether a particular AI deployment will see a good ROI.

In essence, the commercial potential of AI lies in enhancing human capabilities, as emphasized by Thoughtworks' human-centric approach. Real-world applications, including Mondelez International's creativity amplification and Marimekko's revenue growth through automation, exemplify tangible benefits. Challenges like ethical considerations and AI understanding require strategic mitigations. As AI shapes consumer behaviors, organizations must streamline objectives, aligning initiatives for optimal ROI and positive customer experiences. The synergy between human ingenuity and AI capabilities is central to sustainable success in the digital era.