In this post: Take our quiz to find out how your business should adopt AI. 

You know your business should be using AI in some way. But does that mean using it to generate a few headline ideas, or introducing a whole new AI product? The answer depends on the state of your business.

At Section we’ve developed a framework called OAT (Optimize, Accelerate, Transform) to help you assess your business’ AI readiness. Today I’ll share the framework with you and guide you through each question, showing you our answers along the way.

Want to do this in a group and get feedback? Sign up for Generative AI Business Strategy in January and make AI your superpower in 2024. Use code GENAI for 20% off the course.

Take the quiz

How should your business be using AI? 

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How to think about each question

Question 1: How would you rate the threat of AI to your team, function, or category?

How to think about this: AI poses a significant threat to functions and industries that do a lot of high-effort, high-cost labor that can be easily outsourced to AI – for example, idea generation, content creation, content analysis, customer service, etc. This means if your business or job function (looking at you, marketers, consultants, and customer service organizations) is in the business of any of these things, then you should rank yourself “High.”

How I answered: HIGH. We’re in the content business, and all of edtech will be disrupted by AI-powered learning experiences. We need to get ahead of AI before we’re replaced by it.

Question 2: What level of organizational buy-in do you have for AI initiatives? 

How to think about this: Has your CEO made AI a priority for your organization? Have you been encouraged to explore AI optimizations on your team? Your level of organizational buy-in will determine whether you need to get “quick wins” on the board before investing. 

How I answered: HIGH. Greg and our management team are bullish (read: obsessed) on AI’s ability to improve our internal processes and change our student experience. We’ll greenlight any pilot that tests using AI to drive our business objectives.

Question 3: What’s your personal ability to influence your internal workflow or product roadmap?

How to think about this: Even if you have organizational buy-in, you won’t get far if you don’t have personal influence. Consider whether you own a budget, manage others, set a team strategy or roadmap, or have the ability to influence your boss’ strategic investments. Note: If you’re a product manager or lead a team (and therefore can influence internal team processes), you should rate this high. If you’re an individual contributor in a large organization, you might answer low or medium. 

How I answered: HIGH. I’m the COO at Section, and we’re a small company. I oversee five departments and have a lot of influence over our product roadmap and internal workflows.

Question 4: What level of budget / bandwidth do you have for AI?

How to think about this: All AI projects take resources, but many require tech talent, building new skills sets, or large budgets.  Consider your team’s technical prowess, internal budgets for AI or new experiments in general, and your team’s bandwidth to test new initiatives.

How I answered: LOW. We have a small tech team (and small company overall) with relatively small budgets. We have a ton of appetite to implement AI but small budgets and no dedicated AI team.

Question 5: What’s your internal (employee) or external (customer) readiness to use AI?

How to think about this: Are your employees or customers constantly nagging you about the latest AI release, or do they respond to mentions of AI with, “I don’t know…”? Their enthusiasm will determine whether anyone adopts the AI process or tool you introduce. And it’ll keep you going when your AI projects hit a roadblock.

How I answered: MEDIUM. Employee and member enthusiasm is high. But we also work with large enterprise companies, and they’re understandably more risk-averse when it comes to AI. 

Question 6: What level of access do you have to training data or content to train AI? 

How to think about this: Unless you’re developing your own LLM (unlikely), any AI tool you develop will depend on proprietary data for a competitive advantage. Think about whether your business has proprietary data – such as industry data, customer data, scripts, publications, etc. – that could make an AI tool more useful. 

How I answered: HIGH. Like I said, we’re in the content business. We have hundreds of proprietary strategic frameworks from our courses that can’t be accessed with a Google search. These are what we’re using to train ProfAI, Section’s AI-powered course tutor.

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Question 7: How free is your business from regulatory constraints?

How to think about this: It’ll be harder to develop AI tools using proprietary data if you work in a highly regulated industry – for example, healthcare. Think about the data you have access to: What are you allowed to do with it? 

How I answered: HIGH. Edtech has limited regulation, so we have a high level of freedom relative to other industries like healthcare or financial services. . Though we will need our students’ consent if we want to re-purpose their data or project work to train ProfAI (like any company trying to fine-tune a model).

Question 8: How would you rate your business’ ability to verify the quality of AI-generated output?

‍How to think about this: This one is all about QA processes, expertise, and bandwidth. AI is still relatively unreliable, so you need to check its work. This requires the expertise to know if AI is providing accurate information, a process for QA-ing its results, and enough team members and time to conduct a regular audit. 

How I answered: MEDIUM. We’re experts in our own frameworks, but we don’t have that many team members. We’re already learning it requires more resources to do more than spot-check AI-generated outputs. 

How we scored

We scored 20 out of a possible 24, which means we should look at projects to optimize our processes, accelerate our product roadmap, and potentially transform our business model. That makes sense: We’re a content platform with a nimble and hungry team, and we have more ability to pivot than a huge organization that doesn’t face a lot of threat from AI.

An important note: When we did this 6 months ago, we had a score of 18, so we were only focused on optimizing and accelerating. Since then, we’ve changed our point of view on the threat of AI to our business, which pushed our score higher and forced us to start to evaluate ways AI could transform our business.

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I’d love to hear how your exercise went – shoot me a note and let me know. 

Want to do this in a group and get feedback? Sign up for Generative AI Business Strategy in January and make AI your superpower in 2024. Use code GENAI for 20% off the course.