Speakers:
Kyle Burkholder, Partner, Cloud Services | Vikrant Rai, Partner, Internal Audit & SOX | Jennifer Morelli, Partner, Transformation
KYLE BURKHOLDER: We see a lot of clients getting out of the gate and feeling board pressure to take some initial steps, but they’re missing the grounding of those pilots in a business case that actually matters.
For us, there are four things that get us out of the gate. One is that business case. Another, though, is looking and making sure from a technology readiness perspective — data, infrastructure, security — that we’re well-positioned there. Third, we look at, from an adoption perspective, what support are we going to put in to operationalize, to embrace, and advance that pilot for it to be successful. And lastly is governance.
So we should think beyond the initial user group, how is it that I have, from an intake perspective or other aspects, that I’m properly going to be able to support that pilot as it grows? So we find that when clients are looking across all four of those aspects, they’re most successful.
VIKRANT RAI: Most organizations have moved from pilot stages into production. About 40% of companies struggled to see that happen last year, but as the AI evolution and the initiatives have progressed, we’re seeing more and more adoption toward taking it more mainstream.
Taking it across the enterprise requires better governance, better optimization of processes and making sure that as AI initiatives are moving from pilot to production, they are going through strategic steps in terms of understanding the business case, aligning it with the broader AI strategy and ensuring that governance, risk, and compliance initiatives are taken into account as pilot solutions move into production.
JENNIFER MORELLI: In order to scale a pilot, you really do need to think about all the contextual areas in which that pilot touches. So things like operating model, workflows, performance management, all of the ways of working of the teams leveraging whatever that AI pilot is, so that you embed it once again into the way we do things around here. Not just “Here’s a fun AI tool for us.”