Welcome to the new Lead with AI podcast.

In this series, we speak to senior leaders responsible for rolling out AI in their organizations and uncover deeply valuable insights into what success looks like.

In today’s episode, we speak to Boston Consulting Group’s X global CTO, Matt Kropp, and hear about:

Why 70% of AI's value comes from people, not just the technology itself
How to successfully implement AI, including the importance of employee engagement, co-designing solutions, and continuous education through peer sharing.
How AI can drive business growth beyond mere cost-cutting, ultimately creating better jobs for more people, and why focusing on 'joy at work' might be the key to unlocking AI's full potential.
What factors you should consider when choosing which AI platforms to select for your teams and building your own AI technology?

Here are the actionable key takeaways from the conversation:

Successfully Rolling Out AI Means Focusing on Joy.

You need a strategy that answers where you can use the technology and what impact you’re trying to achieve.
Look at the end-to-end process you’re trying to affect. What is the work?
Identify where there is toil and automatable human effort in those steps, the work people don’t like to do. Identify where there is joy, and preserve that. Use AI to create better jobs for humans, which will boost the quality of work, job satisfaction, and employee engagement and retention.

AI is a Change Effort. Matt shared that BCG talks about the idea of 10-20-70 when building technology. 10% of the effort and 10% of the value come from the algorithm, 20% from the software, and 70% of the value and effort come from driving change in the organization. The true value of AI implementation lies not in the technology itself but in organizational change.
Co-Design and Educate to Get Everyone on the AI Train. The key is to co-design solutions with the people using them. Involving employees in the AI implementation leads to better adoption and more effective solutions. Create cross-functional teams that include end-users when designing and implementing AI solutions to ensure they meet real needs and are readily adopted. Ensure education about the technology's benefits.
Selecting your LLM Starts with What Productivity Suite and Cloud Provider You Have. With continuous product upgrades across the major LLMs like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, choosing your company’s LLM isn’t easy. Separating the questions about which tools you’ll get for your teams and what you need to build your own AI applications. For the employee tools question, consider what productivity software you’re using and paying for.
Matt’s final point is to not just focus on costs. Yes, we’ve heard a lot about AI being a cost saver, but also consider the tremendous opportunity. As Matt says, 80% of jobs will be augmented by AI. For the rest, we still need humans. So, create a better job for them, even allowing them to do things they could never have done before. Can you use AI to reinvent your offering?

Reading more at: www.flexos.work/learn/human-ai-featuring-boston-consulting-group-cto-matt-kropp

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