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Build Your AI Strategic Roadmap

Transforming the organization with AI.

  • Organizations need to understand this disruptive technology and the trends to properly develop a strategy for leveraging this technology successfully.
  • The AI strategy requires alignment to a business strategy.
  • Establish responsible AI principles to mitigate the risks involved with implementing AI-based solutions.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Business stakeholders need to cut through the hype surrounding AI, including apps like ChatGPT, to optimize investments for leveraging this technology to drive business outcomes.
  • Understand the market landscape, benefits, and risks associated with AI.
  • Understand the gaps the organization needs to address to fully leverage AI.

Impact and Result

  • A high-level plan that provides guiding principles for AI applications that are fully driven by the business needs and capabilities that are essential to the organization.
  • A strategy that tightly weaves business needs and the applications required to support them. It covers AI governance, data management, people, processes, and technology.
  • A way to ensure that the necessary people, processes, and technology are in the right place at the right time to sufficiently support business goals.

Build Your AI Strategic Roadmap Research & Tools

1. Build Your AI Strategy Roadmap — An actionable AI strategy that considers your business strategy, AI goals, and responsible AI principles as you prioritize use cases for upcoming initiatives.

Develop use cases and one-page descriptions as you establish context with your goals and responsible AI principles.

2. AI Initiatives Prioritization and Roadmap Planning Tool — Prioritizes AI business initiatives by evaluating the value and feasibility for each initiative.

Transform your use cases to prioritized AI initiatives and plan your roadmap.

3. AI Maturity Assessment Tool — Assess maturity of an organization with respect to people, process, technology, data management capabilities, and AI governance.

Use the AI Maturity Assessment tool to identify the Current AI Maturity of your organization.

4. AI Strategy and Discovery Presentation Template — A best-of-breed AI strategy for your stakeholders.

Your organization’s AI strategy, including your responsible AI principles, use cases with one-page summaries, and a high-level roadmap.


Member Testimonials

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City of Lakeland

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Altaz provided great advice on how to structure a statewide presentation on a web-based AI solution called AskCA.gov.


Workshop: Build Your AI Strategic Roadmap

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Establish the Scope of Your AI Strategy

The Purpose

Confirm the boundaries and limitations of your AI strategy.

Key Benefits Achieved

Develop your readiness to act based on validated goals and principles.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Understand AI in the context of your industry.

1.2

Develop the AI vision and strategic principles.

  • AI vision statement
  • Strategic AI principles
1.3

Identify the drivers of value.

1.4

Articulate your responsible AI principles.

  • Responsible AI principles

Module 2: Assess Current AI Maturity and Identify AI Use Cases

The Purpose

Understand and confirm the current state.

Key Benefits Achieved

Well-informed set of AI use cases with strong link to strategy and culture

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Understanding the dimensions of AI maturity.

  • Business AI initiatives
2.2

Assess the current state of AI maturity.

  • AI maturity assessment results
2.3

Identify AI use cases in alignment with strategic business goals.

Module 3: Prioritize AI Use Cases

The Purpose

Establish priorities for next steps.

Key Benefits Achieved

Promotion of high-value ideas with believable ability to execute

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Filter and prioritize use cases based on value and feasibility of execution.

  • Prioritized AI use cases
3.2

Define business-aligned AI initiatives.

  • Identified challenges and risk for use cases
  • Initiative one-pagers for selected AI use cases

Module 4: Develop Your AI Roadmap

The Purpose

Visualize high-priority use cases in a realistic timeline.

Key Benefits Achieved

Leadership alignment on priority and timing

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Develop the AI roadmap.

  • AI roadmap (Gantt chart format)
4.2

Determine next steps and communication approach.

  • Preliminary AI strategy presentation
4.3

Present the AI roadmap to the executive leadership team.


Build Your AI Strategic Roadmap

Develop your AI strategy to maximize return and mitigate risks with your AI investments

Analyst Perspective

Transforming the organization with AI

Bill Wong

Today, every organization is being challenged to determine their strategy on the use of AI-based solutions. Never in our history has a technology become so accessible and at that same time, so disruptive with the benefits and new risks introduced. This is a unique time in our history where the benefits of AI are transformative and readily accessible to all organizations. But the introduction of transformative capabilities also introduces new risks that need to be planned for.

A successful business-driven AI strategy requires:

  • An AI strategy that is driven by and aligned to the organizational strategy.
  • Responsible AI guiding principles to mitigate the risks that are introduced with the deployment of AI-based solutions.
  • Candidate business capabilities that can be augmented or automated with AI that drive business value.
  • A roadmap to deliver and support new AI-based solutions.
Bill Wong

Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

AI is disrupting all industries and providing opportunities for organization-wide advantages.

Organizations need to understand this disruptive technology and the trends to properly develop a strategy for leveraging this technology successfully.

  • The AI strategy requires alignment to a business strategy.
  • Establish responsible AI principles to mitigate the risks involved with implementing AI-based solutions.
  • Organizations need to adopt a data-driven culture.

All organizations, regardless of size, should be planning how to respond to this new and innovative technology.

Common Obstacles

Business stakeholders need to cut through the hype surrounding AI, like ChatGPT, to optimize investments for leveraging this technology to drive business outcomes. They need to:

  • Understand the market landscape, benefits, and risks associated with AI.
  • Plan for responsible AI.
  • Understand the gaps the organization needs to address to fully leverage AI.

Without a proper strategy and responsible AI guiding principles, the risks to deploying this technology could negatively impact business outcomes.

Solution

Info-Tech’s human-centric, value-based approach is a guide for deploying AI applications and covers including:

  • Aligning AI initiatives to the organization’s business drivers.
  • Adopting responsible AI guiding principles.
  • Evolving an AI maturity model.
  • Prioritizing candidate generative AI-based use cases.
  • Developing policies for usage.

This blueprint will provide a list of activities and deliverables required for the successful deployment of generative AI solutions.

Info-Tech Insight

Create awareness among the CEO and C-suite of executives about the potential benefits and risks of transforming the business with generative AI.

Key concepts

AI Vision Statement

An effective AI vision statement is usually forward-looking and aspirational and reflects the organization’s commitment to leveraging AI to deliver positive and responsible outcomes.

Strategic AI Principles

Guiding principles that align the business strategy with the AI strategy and reflect the organization’s overall approach to the use of AI. Whether AI should be used or not and the decision whether to buy or build the AI application are examples of strategic principles.

Responsible AI Principles

Guiding principles to govern the development, deployment, and maintenance of AI applications to mitigate the possible risks from deploying AI-based applications. In addition, these principles also address human-based requirements that AI applications should address.

AI Strategy

A business-driven AI strategy is aligned with the organizational strategy of the firm. Key components of the AI strategy include:

  • AI Vision and Mission Statements
  • Business Value Drivers
  • Strategic AI Principles
  • Responsible AI Principles

Business Value Drivers

These drivers represent the key ways value is recognized by the organization and are used to ensure candidate AI initiatives are aligned to the goals and objectives of the organization.

AI Maturity Model

AI strategic directions are part of the overall strategic planning process and are designed to align AI initiatives with the organization’s vision and goals. These directions provide a roadmap regarding where to leverage AI to maximize the benefits to the organization.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations that are looking to:

  • Develop a business-driven AI strategy to maximize benefits and minimize the risks associated with AI-based solutions.
  • Understand the potential opportunities to improve business outcomes and best practices to govern the risks with developing or deploying AI applications.
  • Assess the organization’s capabilities to provide AI governance, a data platform optimized for analytics, access to AI skills, processes, and the supporting technology infrastructure.
  • Have clear metrics in place to measure the progress and success of AI initiatives.
  • Build the roadmap to implement the candidate use cases.

Common obstacles

These barriers are challenging for many organizations:

  • Getting all the right business stakeholders together to develop the organization’s AI strategy, vision, and objectives.
  • Establishing responsible AI guiding principles to guide AI investments and deployments.
  • Advancing the AI maturity of the organization to meet requirements of data and AI governance as well as human-based requirements such as fairness, transparency, and accountability.
  • Assessing AI opportunities and developing policies for use.

Info-Tech’s definition of a business-oriented AI strategy

An effective AI strategy is driven by the business stakeholders of the organization and focused on delivering improved business outcomes.

A business-oriented AI strategy includes:

  • guiding principles for AI applications that are fully driven by the business needs, and capabilities that are essential to the organization.
  • a strategy that tightly weaves business needs and the applications required to support them. It covers AI governance, data management, people, processes, and technology.
  • a way to ensure that the necessary people, processes, and technology are in place at the right time to sufficiently support business goals.
  • an AI strategy roadmap to communicate how strategic initiatives will address business concerns.

This blueprint in context

This guidance covers how to create an AI strategy roadmap for executing AI initiatives

Scope

  • This blueprint provides guidance for aligning your AI strategy with your organizational strategy.
  • This approach sets the foundations for building and applying responsible AI principles and AI policies aligned to corporate governance and key regulatory obligations (e.g. privacy). Both steps are foundational components of how you should develop, manage, and govern your AI program but are not a substitute for implementing broader AI governance.

Guidance on how to implement AI governance can be found in the blueprint linked below.

Tactical Plan is the intersection of Business Strategy, AI Strategy and Governance.

Download our AI Governance blueprint

Measure the value of this blueprint

Leverage this blueprint’s approach to ensure your AI initiatives align with and support your key business drivers

This blueprint will guide you to drive and improve business outcomes. Key business drivers will often focus on:

  • Improving customer experience
  • Increasing revenue
  • Reducing costs
  • Improving time to market
  • Reducing risk

Once you implement your 12-month roadmap, start tracking the metrics below over the next fiscal year (Year 1) to assess the effectiveness of measures:

Business Outcome Objective

Key Success Metric

Improving Customer Experience
Increased customer engagement and market share
Increasing Revenue
Increased revenue from identified key areas
Reducing Costs
Decreased costs for identified business units
Improving Time to Market
Time savings and accelerated revenue adoption
Reducing Risk
Cost savings or revenue gains from identified business units

Business Value Drivers: AI key initiative plan. Improving customer experience, Increasing revenue, Reducing costs, Improving time to market, and Reducing risk.

In phase 1 of this blueprint, we will help you identify the key AI strategy initiatives that align to your organization’s goals. Value to the organization is often measured by the estimated impact on revenue, costs, time to market, or risk mitigation.

In phase 4, we will help you develop a plan and a roadmap for addressing any gaps and introducing the relevant AI capabilities that drive value to the organization based on defined business metrics.

Transforming the organization with AI.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

10.0/10
Overall Impact

$64,999
Average $ Saved

29
Average Days Saved

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Read what our members are saying

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Guided Implementation 1: Session 1: Establish Scope of AI Strategy
  • Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges
  • Call 2: Define AI vision statement.
  • Call 3: Identify strategic principles
  • Call 4: Establish responsible AI guiding principles

Guided Implementation 2: Session 2: Assess Current AI Maturity & Identify AI Use Cases
  • Call 1: Assess the organization’s current state capabilities for managing AI
  • Call 2: : Identify candidate business capabilities to be addressed by AI-based solutions

Guided Implementation 3: Session 3: Prioritize AI Use Cases
  • Call 1: Assess the value and feasibility for the business AI initiatives
  • Call 2: Prioritize the business AI initiatives

Guided Implementation 4: Session 4: Develop Your AI Strategy Roadmap
  • Call 1: Build a strategy roadmap
  • Call 2: Build a communication plan
  • Call 3: Build an executive AI strategy roadmap deck

Authors

Bill Wong

Cem Sezen

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