What Digital Transformation Looks Like in the Age of Generative AI

Insights on Digital Transformation and Generative AI

Digital Transformation felt like a well-structured, formal progression. Long roadmaps, numerous milestones, multiple-year initiatives were set as an example of successful digital transformation. Generative-AI has changed that approach to digital transformation. The fact is that Generative-AI has disrupted this transformation process and many of those well thought out plans now seem, let’s face it- antiquated.

Now, the new approach to digital transformation appears very much more fluid, less predictable and in some aspects represent a more human element to the business.

Transforming Decisions vs. Systems

Historically, digital transformation had a great deal of focus on systems, i.e, moving to the cloud, modernization of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), streamline processes, among other issues.

Generative-AI refocuses the efforts of digital transformation from improving business systems to improving business decision-making. How quickly an organization can interpret information, gain insight into that information and act on that information is what the bottleneck is in today’s world.

In a retail transformation where I was a part of, the most significant value or breakthrough did not result from implementing a new platform but rather through the use of AI tools by merchandising teams to validate pricing scenarios and test those scenarios almost in real-time. The AI technology did not replace the merchandising teams but instead augmented their data validation process.

The messiness of AI

As much as we like to think that adopting AI for a business is a linear process, it isn’t. AI adoption is messy- some teams seem to move rather quickly, while others seem to hesitate. Governance has difficulty keeping up with both fast and slow moving teams. It is in the messiness of adopting AI for many organizations where the technology is the easy part but the alignment of teams that represent a much higher degree of difficulty.