Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Build an AI strategy
that survives first
contact with reality
By Mike Mason
Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Introduction  3

Relentlessly refresh to stay ahead 4

Benefits of AI continuous delivery practices  5

Don’t starve on low-hanging fruit 5

Guardrails matter 6

Author9

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Introduction
Whether you think next-generation AI heralds an exciting new
world for humankind or sows the seeds for its destruction,
few business leaders can afford to ignore it. But in this febrile
environment, it can be hard to plot a course that neither falls foul
of the hype nor misses the opportunity entirely.
You need only look at the breakneck advances being made in
generative AI to appreciate how fast the field is moving. OpenAI’s
ChatGPT was released publicly in November 2022. The updated
version, based on the GPT-4 large language model, offers a
step change in capabilities to the extent that some Microsoft
researchers gushed that it showed the “first sparks of artificial
general intelligence.” A slew of kindred tools, from Midjourney
and Stable Diffusion to Voicebox, are pushing the boundaries of
what user-friendly AI tools can do.
For AI solutions to achieve lasting value, businesses need
an iterative strategy paired with experimentation, robust
engineering practices, and guardrails.
Every business needs to explore the AI opportunities that are
opening up — yet, they don’t need to buy into such hyperbole
to appreciate these opportunities.

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Relentlessly refresh to stay ahead

AI is already pervasive. Many organizations are leveraging it
to glean insights from the oceans of data they have access to.
But this period marks a sea change, catapulting AI forward in
the user experience. The real challenge facing today’s business
leaders is this: How can a business capitalize on AI capabilities
today while planning for its future trajectory?
For many enterprises that means rebuilding your AI strategy
to account for the likely evolution of generative AI (GenAI). It’s
already easy to see GenAI’s potential to impact functions such as
information technology, customer service, sales and marketing,
and product development. But every function — indeed every
industry — can expect to be reshaped by AI. No business leader
can afford to be caught off guard: To maintain market share,
or even outpace the competition, your AI strategy needs to
be constantly refreshed. Otherwise, you risk decreasing your
operational effectiveness. Worse, products and the market might
change in a way that doesn’t allow your business to keep up.
To be effective, your AI strategy needs to first appreciate that
AI is not a specific tool but an approach that can be embedded
into any number of applications, processes or potential solutions.
Increasingly, the thing that gives an organization an edge
is the ability to integrate AI into the business. Your ability to
build or consume solutions isn’t necessarily going to be your
differentiator — instead, it’s your ability to integrate these
solutions into your processes and products.
And your AI strategy must be continuously updated to reflect the
changing landscape. At Thoughtworks, we’ve taken our learnings
from continuous delivery practices and applied them to AI, so
that clients make fast feedback a central tenet of their strategy.
This enables them to identify where they’re gaining value or
pivot when tech advances open up new fields.

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Benefits of AI continuous delivery

practices

Evaluate Monitor
Build and Productionalize and verify
model Test Deploy
model experiment observability

Enables faster Remove organizational Improve productivity Create a robust

learning barriers governance process

Benefits of AI continuous delivery practices

Don’t starve on low-hanging fruit

Given the huge advances we’re seeing in AI right now, it’s
not surprising that many organizations have pockets of
experimentation spread throughout their operations.
At Thoughtworks, we think that’s a good thing: Experimentation
can rapidly identify use cases with serious potential for
your organization.
But there’s also risk: If you don’t plan from the outset how you
intend to scale successful proofs of concept — and embed
them in the business — there’s a real chance that you’ll only
pick off the low-hanging fruit. To avoid this, you should identify
opportunities across the business to leverage the same solution
or approach multiple times.
It helps to plan to leverage AI for things beyond mere efficiency
— like improving ideas. Sure, ChatGPT might help you create
that business proposal in record time, but why not look at how

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

GenAI can help you generate ideas, refine designs for products
and services, or understand your strategic options?
For one of our clients, one of the world’s leading snack food
producers, AI is supporting elements of recipe creation, which
is a historically complicated task given the dozens of possible
ingredients and ways to combine them. By partnering product
specialists with AI, the organization can generate higher quality
recipes faster. The organization’s system has reduced the
number of steps needed to develop recipes for new products
from 150 (on average) to just 15. Now, it can more quickly delight
customers with new products and new experiences to keep
them connected to the brand.
Notably, AI does not work in isolation but rather augments skilled
teams, providing guidance and feedback to further improve
outcomes. This is a hallmark of successful AI solutions:
They are ultimately designed for people, and a multidisciplinary
team that comprises domain and technical expertise as well
as a human focus, to enable organizations to get the most
value out of them.

Guardrails matter
When thinking about how to get the most from AI, your AI
strategy should also consider the appropriate guardrails.
As solutions become more sophisticated — and embedded more
frequently and deeply into software, products and day-to-day
operations — their potential to allow people to make mistakes
increases, too. One common antipattern we see is when humans
become unintentionally over-reliant on fairly stable AI — think
of the developer who doesn’t check the AI-generated code, or
the Tesla driver lulled into a false sense of security by the car’s
autopilot features.

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There needs to be careful governance parameters around usage

of AI to avoid that type of over-dependency and risk exposure.
While many of your AI experiments might produce exciting ideas
to explore, you need to be mindful of the tools that underpin
them. Some AI solutions are not built following the kind of
robust engineering practices you’d demand for other enterprise
software. Carefully think about which ones you’d be confident
deploying into production.
It helps to test AI models in the same way you would any
other application — and don’t let the rush to market cloud
your judgment. AI solutions should be supported by the same
continuous delivery principles that underpin good product
development, with progress made through incremental changes
that can be easily reversed if they don’t have the desired impact.
You will find it helps to be up-front about what you consider to
be a “desired” result — it may not only be financial metrics that
define your success. Depending on your organization’s context,
productivity and customer experience might also be important
considerations. You might look at other leading indicators,
such as your team’s awareness of the potential of AI and their
comfort level in exploring, adopting, or deploying AI solutions.
These factors can give you confidence that your team is on track
toward improving any lagging indicators of customer experience,
productivity, and revenue. However you approach it, you’re more
likely to succeed if you’ve identified those metrics at the outset.
Finally, for all the bluster about the threat AI poses to people’s
jobs — or even to humanity at large — you’ll do well to remember
that it’s your people who will be using the technology. Consider
the human side of change, where you strike a balance between
encouraging people to adopt and innovate with AI while
remaining sensitive to the problems it can present. You might,
for instance, want to introduce guidelines to protect intellectual

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

property in models that draw on external sources or privacy,

where you may be using sensitive customer data. We often
find it’s better to give our people a say in where AI augments
their work. They know, better than anyone, where it can have
the most impact.

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Author

Mike Mason
Chief AI Officer
I’ve long been fascinated about bringing cutting-edge
technology to bear on business problems, and I’m proud to
have been able to contribute to that through Thoughtworks’
Technology Radar and Looking Glass publications, and by
co-authoring Digital Transformation Game Plan with Guo Xiao
and Gary O’Brien.
I joined Thoughtworks in 2003, and worked with our clients in
the UK, North America, and now globally. I was Global Head of
Technology from 2017, where I was responsible for building our
capability internally through global technology initiatives, and
ensuring the success of our client partnerships.
My current role is Chief AI Officer, where my focus is on
generative AI, and specifically how to accelerate the adoption
of this technology both internally and through the services
we provide for our clients — enabling them to accelerate their
adoption of AI, bring AI into their software process and transform
their businesses and operations through AI.

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

I believe GenAI is a once-in-a-generation shift in the tech

industry, and eagerly anticipate Thoughtworks playing a pivotal
role in driving the industry forward.

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Build an AI strategy that survives first contact with reality

Thoughtworks is a global technology consultancy

that integrates strategy, design and engineering
to drive digital innovation. We are over 11,500
Thoughtworkers strong across 51 offices in
18 countries. For 30 years, we’ve delivered
extraordinary impact together with our clients
by helping them solve complex business
problems with technology as the differentiator.
thoughtworks.com

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