Not so long ago, Solvd experts conducted a learning session dedicated to the question of how to integrate AI into business workflows and processes.
AI has been making strides in the business world, sparking debates on whether to embrace or reject it, and creating numerous how’s, why’s, what’s and where’s for stakeholders, business owners, experts and decision makers. In this learning session, two of Solvd’s leading AI experts, Denis Avramenko, Solution Architect, and Venu Kanduri, SVP - Digital eXperience, discuss various AI-related issues and their experience with AI integration, and share invaluable insights on the safe integration of Generative AI tools into business routines, as well as demo a cutting-edge AI tool that is already in use.
Dealing with AI Changes: How Businesses Can Tackle Them by Focusing on Key Steps of AI integration
Solvd has been pioneering in the sphere of adapting AI for their own workflows as well as propagating this experience to their customer projects, helping their partners with their own AI transformation processes, raising awareness about how to integrate AI and sharing accumulated AI knowledge.
The discussion covered a large scope, starting out with the evolution of AI, gently guiding AI novices through trending AI integration issues, the problems businesses face with the AI onslaught and what can be done to get prepared for the inevitable.
We outline the following key points:
- Focusing on augmenting human effort, not substituting it, with AI-powered automation.
- AI and privacy and security issues. We explain that secure practices of using AI and machine learning at work should be regulated by clear and transparent policies and guidelines. According to McKinsey research, three quarters of respondents AI will seriously disrupt their business in the few coming years.
- The importance of AI utilization in industry verticals, supply chains and customer service.
- The cornerstone of AI adoption: selecting the AI integration path. Should businesses go with the services from an external provider? Should they turn to custom development? We speak about peculiarities, pros and cons of both models, comparing their delivery metrics, challenges and key problems that they help to solve.
- Meeting the AI prepared: how to place yourself on the cutting edge and not on the bleeding edge of the AI revolution-in-progress and make it your competitive advantage.
- The stages of AI integration: what happens at each stage and what aspects of your business and organizational process are affected
- Best practices that help you to make your AI integration seamless and painless
How to Integrate AI into your business: Milestones
The session outlines and gives useful tips and details for the following AI transformation stages businesses can follow:
Conducting a Comprehensive Survey
Communication is key to success, so this kind of research will help you gather not just important amounts of data, but also stats. In this survey, you can ask stakeholders and employees about possible areas of their work that can benefit from AI enhancement, collect information about AI-related blank spots and potential issues to address them early on, define the general acceptance level and attitude towards AI adoption and make well-informed decisions about the further development course.
Facilitating an Interactive Workshop
Workshop’s discussions, brainstorming and educational sessions will help you to bring people across your organization to be on the same page about the AI integration processes. The idea behind such a workshop is to address people’s questions and elaborate a set of clear goals and objectives for your AI transformation process, simultaneously aligning them with the company’s business goals.
Create an AI prototype
Once you’ve defined the areas that can benefit from AI augmentation, and have your goals straight, you can start working on a prototype of an AI-powered solution to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of your AI strategy. It will help you make a huge leap on the AI integration path, and lay a foundation that can scale the approach to other domains within your company.
Execute the AI Integration
By this stage, you will have the key components of your AI transformation strategy ready and tested in action with your first AI prototype. At this point, it will be clear to you how you can scale the original solution and port it to other operational processes in your company that can be AI-enhanced
Develop AI solution
The result of this stage is an AI-powered framework that enhances multiple spheres where your company functions. It is easily scaled, sustainable and has a robust infrastructure that is flexible enough to accommodate changes, feedback and enter into a development loop cycle.
AI Transformation Journey: Best Practices
Solvd has already accumulated substantial hands-on experience with AI transformation for their own internal and their customer projects. We share some best practices and actionable tips that can make your AI transformation smooth and help you to avoid common pitfalls on the path.
- Start Small, Start Simple
To start implementing AI into your business processes, you don’t need to have a ton of preparations. Start with basic prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation Frameworks (and focus on it instead of LLM),
- Encourage Young Developers with Internal Projects
Internal projects are a relatively safe space for your young devs to experiment with a range of AI systems. A sandbox approach can help you nurture future talent, try things out in a safe environment and create additional motivation for your staff.
- Enhance your AI Policy and Guidelines
This should be a continuous feedback loop and various events meant to raise AI awareness and get your AI policy points across to people working on all levels in your organization. The ground rule here is that everyone should be on the same page.
- Facilitate AI Enhancement for your Customers
Not only does this help you to strengthen the bonds and working relationship with your customers, but enhances your technological alignment and allows you to gather important feedback and use cases for the AI-driven solutions that you offer as products.
- Upskill, Reskill, Cross-skill
To be able to always stay in the loop with the rapid AI development, upskill, reskill and cross-skill your employees. Research names lack of skills one the significant challenges when it comes to how to implement AI into your business. Reskilling will also help you to avoid the problem of extensive human resource allocation.
- A Tandem of Subject Matter Experts and AI Facilitators
A successful AI integration is usually driven from two sides. On the one hand, it’s the AI facilitator, an expert who drives the AI-related change. On the other hand, it’s subject matter experts, who help the facilitator to best consider the particular domain specifics, provide feedback, help define actual pains and problems in the work domain which AI can alleviate.
The Virtual Business Analyst: An AI-powered Creation of a User Story
We can talk about the power of AI solutions and how to incorporate AI into your business ad nauseam, but nothing demonstrates it more efficiently than seeing it in action. We demonstrate the actual work of an AI-powered prototype tool, created by Solvd team, which has User Story Refinement Pipeline for Business Analyst.
The tool combines several reusable blocks with code and prompts which users can interact with, not unlike in a Figma project. Each block works with a separate data input and is designed and tuned to process it in a certain way, thus eliminating the possibility of low quality outcome due to incorrectly composed input prompts.
Some steps are precoded, for example, presenting the output in a specific format (json) or converting it into a markdown document. The connections between the blocks are also pre-programmed, so that the user doesn’t have to use multi-step complex prompts and fine tune them. The prototype uses an integration with an open-source diagramming tool that allows to visualize the output as a diagram for the BA and development team using familiar Business Analyst terminology.
We show us a step by step process of creating a user story for an online shopping application cart. The entire creation process takes less than a minute from project description to first user story draft in jira ticket. This means that the tool can dramatically cut down the work time of a business analyst by automating a standardized process. Not only that, it also improves the outcome by addressing potential errors and eliminating the human factor in their origin.
How Can Solvd Assist in your AI Transformation?
When you take the first steps on the AI transformation journey, it is important to have a trustworthy guide. Solvd’s experts can guide you through each leg of that journey:
- Free start with a consulting session to find your pain points and areas where AI can enhance your company’s operation
- Workshop - brainstorm ideas with your staff and stakeholders to establish common ground and elaborate the further development direction and business goals
- Prototype - build a prototype and demonstrate in action, gather unbiased AI-powered metrics and incorporate feedback
- Integration - build an AI powered feature and launch it, measure its effectiveness, evaluate its performance and reception
- Solution - scale the framework, implement the solution into the system, implement improvements
If you want to know more about Solvd’s expertise in the sphere of AI integration, what we can offer as your partners and how else we can help you with AI adoption, watch the webinar in its entirety and take part in our discussion by leaving your feedback.
