Are CIOs Ready To Use AI To Transform The Business?

Artificial intelligence is going to change everything, are CIOs ready?
Artificial intelligence is going to change everything, are CIOs ready?
Image Credit: Evan

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful new technology that the person with the CIO job is going to have to learn how to harness because of the importance of information technology. We need to realize that the impact of introducing AI powered applications into our business will not just impact the IT department, but rather will impact the entire company. What this is going to mean is that the person in the CIO position is going to have to prepare the rest of the company for the changes that will be coming their way.

AI Changes The Way That We Do Things

Every CIO’s company is facing the same type of problem: we all work on an enormous amount of data each and every day. Once we are done dealing with it, we file it away and there it sits. What we are all missing is a way to manage, share, and collaborate with all of this stored data. We are talking about a lot of data here: documents, media assets, emails, proposals, and contracts. Once we file it, it’s gone for good. Artificial intelligence offers us the possibility of being able to make sense of all of our stored data. This can start to change the business processes that we run. The goal is to bring machine learning into what we are doing every day.

AI Automates What We Do By Hand Today

In every business there are things that are being done by hand today. The goal of the CIO has to be to match the person who has something that has to be done with someone who can do it better than they can. Creating this kind of match requires the collection of information and then using that data and machine learning in order to make these kinds of matches better. The goal is to eventually get to a point where the machines will simply know who is the person who needs the help and will then reach out and offer to help them

AI Is Both An Internal And An External Solution

One of the most important decisions that CIOs are going to have to be making is to determine what technology should be developed in house and when you should reach out to get help from the outside. The key to doing this correctly is to take a look at what you consider to be your company’s most important things right now. These are the things that you have to build yourself. You will develop application programming interfaces (APIs) and other firms will do the same. Where you can get help from the outside is when you want to interface your company’s applications to outside firm’s applications.

To Get AI Right, It’s All About Data

One of the important things that CIOs need to understand is that there is going to be a big battle in the artificial intelligence space. Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Google, and others are going to be battling it out in order to create the best AI tools that will be the easiest to use. What this means for your firm is that you don’t need to create the things that these companies will be creating – that’s a fight that you are going to lose. Instead, what you need to do is to follow how things shake out and then go with the winner and use their tools to develop the AI tools that your company is going to need.

What All Of This Means For You

Changes are coming to the IT department and the CIO is going to have to be the person leading the charge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to be a big part of the changes that are coming and the impact of this technology will be felt not only in the IT department, but also throughout the rest of the company.

AI is going to finally provide CIOs with the tools that they need to deal with all of the data that the company has been collecting. In every company there is a need to match up tasks that people are doing with the people who can do that task better. AI is going to provide the company with the tools that they need to do a better job of making these matches. CIOs need to realize that they are not responsible for creating all of the AI tools that they will use. Instead, they can rely other companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, to create the AI tools that they can then use.

The changes that AI will bring to the company have the power to transform the business. CIOs need to be willing to step up and take charge. AI won’t just affect one part of the business, its impact is going to be felt everywhere. CIOs will need to be the ones who are willing to guide the rest of the business through the transformations that are coming their way.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Is there any part of the company that AI should not be allow to transform?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So let’s pretend for a moment that you’ve switched sides. You are now a hacker that is trying to break into your company’s network because you understand the importance of information technology, want to get money from your company, or do something else that you really should not be doing. How are you going to go about making this happen? In the old days, you’d create a malicious piece of software and then try to smuggle it into the company so that it could do your dirty work for you. However, hackers have since moved on. These days they use a more sophisticated attack: social engineering. As the CIO are you going to be ready to defend against this?