I believe that just about every business can benefit from AI by using it to create better products and services, drive efficiency in their operations, or improve customer experience.

However, not every AI initiative businesses embark on guarantees good results. In fact, according to research by Harvard Business School, as many as 80 percent of industrial AI projects can fail to generate tangible value.

Given the costs involved, this can easily lead to expensive missteps. Therefore, it’s absolutely critical that businesses understand how to measure success or failure before setting out.

Developing processes and systems for evaluating AI’s impact is essential, and in this article, I’ll highlight the questions you need to ask and the information you’ll need to gather.

Whether you’re just starting out or already have a few pilots underway and are getting ready to scale, these can help you understand and refine your approach, setting you up for the best chances at success.

Aligning AI Strategy With Business Strategy

Firstly, it’s important to remember that to even have a chance of understanding the impact of your AI projects, you need to know that they’re aligned with your business targets and goals.

This may seem obvious, but I know from my own experience that it’s frequently overlooked. Technology is never a goal in itself; it’s a tool for achieving goals.

This means first having a business strategy in place and then identifying opportunities to deploy AI in ways that will help you achieve it.

I always recommend that businesses begin by identifying as many opportunities as possible. Then, whittling that list down to a smaller, manageable number of long-term, high-value use cases, along with some “quick win” initiatives that will let you quickly learn to deploy solutions, experiment and build confidence.

This is the groundwork. With a basic AI strategy in place, you can begin assessing and evaluating its impact and go on to improve iteratively, where necessary.

Essential Questions

These are the important questions every business needs to ask about their AI initiatives. We’ll move on to how we answer them in the next section: