How to Develop an AI Strategy that Elevates Your Business

JD Prater

July 5, 2023

Table of Contents

In the fiercely competitive and fast-paced business world, harnessing the power of advanced technology is not merely an option, but a necessity. Of these, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer. However, the success of AI in business is not solely about its adoption; it's about the strategic application of Modern AI—a new paradigm in AI technology.

Modern AI, with its data-centric approach and operationalization of foundation models, represents a transformative shift from traditional AI. It isn't about merely having AI; it's about strategically deploying Modern AI to supercharge business operations and decision-making.

In this post, I'll outline the concept of Modern AI and its strategic implementation in detail. Let’s walk through 6 compelling benefits that your business can reap from strategically integrating Modern AI into its operations.

1. Enhanced Productivity: Empowering Teams and Accelerating Outcomes

Productivity is the lifeblood of a business. Yet, enhancing productivity, especially when faced with intricate operations or vast data, can seem like an uphill battle. This is where a Modern AI strategy can be transformative, automating processes, expediting complex calculations, and driving organizational efficiency.

Our overall findings demonstrate that generative AI working alongside humans can have a significant positive impact on the productivity and retention of individual workers, according to new research from Stanford and MIT.

Leveraging AI for Automation and Expedited Analysis

Implementing a Modern AI strategy can be a game-changer for businesses dealing with large volumes of data, such as customer analytics, community management, and marketplace operations. Consider a business heavily reliant on user feedback. In the traditional setup, teams could spend countless hours manually analyzing user reviews and feedback to identify trends and challenges.

AI's impact on business outcomes

With a Modern AI strategy, this labor-intensive process can be automated. By leveraging technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, vast amounts of textual data can be analyzed swiftly and effectively, constructing a comprehensive overview of user feedback. The result? Not only significant time savings and enhanced accuracy but also an in-depth understanding of user needs and preferences.

The Power of AI Accessibility and Foundation Models

A Modern AI platform like Graft brings AI accessibility to a new level, thanks to an intuitive, easy-to-use UI. This means that even those without deep ML expertise can leverage the power of AI, expanding the range of AI use cases across the organization. This widespread accessibility can dramatically increase organizational productivity.

Moreover, the platform ensures that anything built on it will seamlessly work in the production environment, as the platform itself is the production environment. This eliminates the common challenges of deploying ML models, further enhancing productivity.

Foundation models also play a key role in productivity. Instead of starting from scratch, these models begin within reach of a solution, drastically reducing data and labeling requirements. For instance, a user looking to improve a model's quality can provide feedback (like labeling examples), a task more aligned with their expertise than traditional ML activities.

Freeing Talent for High-Value Tasks

By strategically automating routine tasks with Modern AI, businesses can redirect their teams to focus on strategic, creative tasks. These can range from strategy development to enhancing user relationships or driving product innovation. This strategic shift optimizes human capital use and directly adds value to the business.

In conclusion, a Modern AI strategy is a key productivity driver. It enables businesses to achieve more in less time, maintain high standards, and stay competitive. By strategically implementing Modern AI, businesses can experience faster decision-making, improved user experiences, and a reinforced competitive edge.

2. Extract Insights from Data Faster

Business success hinges on productivity. Yet, enhancing productivity, particularly when dealing with intricate operations or vast amounts of data, is a monumental challenge. This is where strategic application of Modern AI becomes a crucial catalyst, automating tasks and fast-tracking complex computations to boost organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Streamlining and Elevating Routine Tasks 

Strategic implementation of Modern AI brings forth immense benefits for businesses grappling with substantial volumes of data. Let's consider a business that leans heavily on customer feedback. In traditional settings, teams would spend countless hours manually sifting through customer reviews and service records to identify patterns and challenges.

With a Modern AI strategy, businesses can pivot to working smarter, not harder. By harnessing technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, they can swiftly analyze voluminous textual data, discern sentiment, and create a coherent overview of customer feedback. The result? Substantial time savings, increased accuracy, and a profound understanding of customer needs and preferences.

ai-powered predictions to find insights faster

Redirecting Human Talent to High-Value Tasks 

By automating mundane tasks with Modern AI, businesses can liberate their human resources to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors - from formulating strategies and enhancing customer relationships to innovating products. This strategic realignment not only optimizes human capital but also adds tangible value to the business.

Moreover, the beauty of Modern AI lies in its capacity for continuous learning and refinement. As your AI system interacts with more data, it evolves, becoming more efficient and delivering sharper predictions and detailed insights. This ability for constant enhancement allows businesses to keep their edge, securing a competitive advantage.

In a nutshell, a Modern AI strategy is the secret weapon for unlocking productivity. It empowers businesses to accomplish more in less time, uphold high standards, and stay competitive. With Modern AI strategically implemented, businesses can look forward to expedited decision-making, enriched services, and a bolstered competitive edge.

3. Streamlining Costs: Efficiency and Value Maximization through a Strategic AI Approach

While growth is a positive sign for any business, it often incurs increased operational costs. As a result, strategizing to optimize these costs while boosting value becomes a vital business exercise. That's where a Modern AI strategy can shine, streamlining operations, reducing costs, and enhancing the overall value of operations.

Democratizing AI and Streamlining Operations 

A Modern AI strategy can automate numerous tasks that would traditionally require manual labor, thus leading to significant cost reductions. But it doesn't stop there. Modern AI, with its focus on data and use cases, shifts the focus from complex machine learning tasks—like feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning—towards areas where users can truly add value, like providing contextual insights or labeling data. This approach democratizes the use of AI, enabling more team members to leverage its power without needing specialized ML expertise.

cost decrease from AI adoption
Source: McKinsey The State of AI in 2022

Consider a product-led growth (PLG) SaaS Company. The task of monitoring user interactions, feature usage, and user feedback to deliver a seamless and secure user experience and drive product development is paramount. Conventionally, this would require a data team of analysts, data scientists, and engineers, which can inflate operational costs significantly.

A Modern AI platform can automate large parts of this monitoring process, identifying patterns in feature usage, flagging unusual activities, and even predicting user behavior, allowing the company to proactively address potential issues. This reduces the likelihood of costly setbacks such as customer attrition or missed product opportunities, leading to substantial operational savings.

Moreover, a Modern AI platform allows your current data team to achieve more. Instead of spending time piecing together AI infrastructure, they can focus on reducing backlog and being proactive, leading to a more efficient use of resources.

AI-Driven Efficiency in Customer Acquisition and Retention 

Additionally, AI can play a pivotal role in optimizing the company's marketing and customer retention efforts. By analyzing user event data, AI can inform the creation of personalized marketing campaigns and product enhancements. This detailed level of personalization can enhance conversion rates and improve user retention, thereby boosting revenue while reducing the overall cost per acquisition and retention.

Therefore, a Modern AI strategy isn't just about cutting costs—it's a transformative approach that enhances efficiency, maximizes value for every dollar spent, and drives strategic cost optimization. Its potential for significant cost reductions, coupled with efficiency and value-maximizing capabilities, makes it an indispensable component of the modern business toolkit.

4. Scalability: Key to Adaptability and Growth

As your business expands, it confronts escalating operational demands. In this journey, scalability transforms from a desirable attribute into a critical necessity, particularly when managing burgeoning marketplaces or handling data surges. The strategic integration of Modern AI affords remarkable scalability, preparing your business for continuous growth, adaptability, and diverse use cases.

Universally Accessible and Scalable

A Modern AI strategy is not only about your team's ability to deal with an escalating workload. It also encompasses the Modern AI platform's capacity to process increasingly large data sets swiftly and precisely. Just as one doesn't need to understand the intricacies of a car's mechanics to drive it, the power of AI can be harnessed without a deep understanding of machine learning algorithms. This universal accessibility encourages a variety of team members to leverage AI, scaling the range of business use cases it can support.

Imagine you’re at a rapidly growing online marketplace. Your growth results in an explosion of user data, with every transaction, interaction, product listing, and customer review contributing valuable insights into user behavior and preferences.

Finding similar customers using AI

Traditional data analysis methods struggle to synthesize the wide variety of information, leading to slowdowns and compromises on accuracy. In contrast, a Modern AI shines in these conditions. The marketplace, equipped with a Modern AI platform, can seamlessly scale its data processing capabilities, analyzing incoming data swiftly to provide real-time insights into user behavior and market trends. Plus, it’s accessible to an ever-widening community.

Transforming Growth into Action 

These insights allow your marketplace to refine product recommendations, enhance the UI, and make other improvements that bolster user satisfaction and drive sales. In turn, as the marketplace expands, your capacity to extract valuable insights from data, powered by AI, grows correspondingly.

In summary, a Modern AI strategy's scalability enables businesses to stay agile, informed, and versatile in their use of AI, regardless of data requirements. This scalability is not just a benefit—it's a critical requirement for businesses striving to flourish in a data-centric world. Without it, businesses risk being overwhelmed by data, missing valuable insights, and losing their competitive edge.

5. Boosting Precision and Consistency: The Modern AI Advantage 

The precision and dependability of data analysis form the cornerstone of informed decision-making. A Modern AI strategy ushers in an era of unparalleled precision and consistency, empowering you to base your strategic decisions on robust, data-backed insights.

Through the deployment of Modern AI, utilizing foundation models with pre-training and fine-tuning techniques, there is a significant enhancement in the precision and consistency of data analysis and forecasting. This heightened accuracy proves invaluable across numerous use cases, including customer analytics, community management, and marketplace operations.

retailer using modern ai
Source: PwC AI Specialists

Deciphering Patterns and Forecasting Trends 

A salient aspect of a Modern AI strategy is its exceptional ability to detect patterns, forecast behaviors, and identify trends in large datasets - capabilities often beyond the reach of conventional methods. This ability gains paramount importance when handling extensive, complex datasets brimming with diverse variables.

Consider a SaaS company that embraces a strategic approach to Modern AI for its customer analytics. Each day, thousands of customers interact with the platform, generating an avalanche of data from login times and feature usage to customer support interactions. The sheer volume and complexity of this data could easily overwhelm traditional analysis methods.

However, with the implementation of Modern AI, the SaaS company can harness a foundation model pretrained on vast amounts of data, perfectly equipped to handle this complexity. The model meticulously dissects the data, accurately pinpointing usage patterns linked with customer churn. Armed with this information, various teams can proactively address customer concerns, potentially averting client attrition.

Active Learning: The Building Block of Dependable AI 

What's more, Modern AI platforms embody the principle of active learning, refining their analyses and predictions with each new data set they ingest. Over time, the reliability amplifies, offering businesses a consistently dependable platform that progressively enhances its effectiveness. This active learning cycle highlights the trustworthiness of a strategic Modern AI approach, evidencing its consistent delivery of razor-sharp insights.

Active Learning with Graft

6. Efficiency and Speed: A Competitive Edge

Speed and efficiency often determine whether a company leads the market or lags behind. Modern AI strategy is the embodiment of these attributes, offering businesses a competitive edge through swift and efficient data analysis.

In a Modern AI strategy, efficiency relates to the system's capacity to process vast amounts of data while minimizing resource usage. Consider a delivery service that utilizes AI for route optimization. Traditional methods might involve lengthy computations and manual adjustments, taking up several hours. On the other hand, a Modern AI strategy, anchored on foundation models, could accomplish the same task in mere minutes, consuming fewer computational resources.

Agility and Speed: A Winning Combo

Speed, in this context, refers to how quickly these systems can glean insights from data. Take the example of an e-commerce business leveraging Modern AI for price optimization. Where a traditional approach might necessitate weeks of manual adjustments and analysis, a strategic application of Modern AI can adjust prices in real-time based on fine-tuning and active learning.

Envision a business deploying a Modern AI strategy for community management, wherein an active online forum generates thousands of posts each day. Manually monitoring these posts for compliance with community guidelines could be a daunting, time-intensive task.

Nevertheless, with a Modern AI strategy that utilizes technologies like natural language processing (understanding and generating human language) and sentiment analysis (interpreting and classifying emotions), the business can monitor posts in real-time. This system not only flags potentially problematic posts but also identifies trending topics within the community - a feat virtually unattainable with traditional methods.

In conclusion, the unparalleled speed and efficiency brought to the table by a Modern AI strategy render it an indispensable asset for businesses grappling with large data volumes. By delivering quick, accurate insights, it bestows businesses with a significant competitive edge, empowering them to stay ahead in their respective fields.

Elevating Your Business with a Modern AI Strategy

A Modern AI strategy is more than an operational upgrade - it signifies a revolutionary framework for strategic excellence.

At its core, a Modern AI strategy offers deep, precise insights, revealing nuanced understanding of customer behavior and preferences. This rich perspective empowers businesses to make data-driven strategic decisions, enhancing customer experiences and driving superior business outcomes.

“AI high performers are 1.6 times more likely than other organizations to engage nontechnical employees in creating AI applications by using emerging low-code or no-code programs.” Source: McKinsey The State of AI in 2022

The precision and reliability inherent in Modern AI establish a solid foundation of trust, enabling businesses to confidently shape their strategies and day-to-day operations based on the intelligence provided.

Moreover, the unparalleled scalability of a Modern AI strategy allows businesses to adapt dynamically to market shifts or customer needs, providing an unmatched level of agility. This adaptability, paired with rapid and efficient data processing, allows businesses to respond to new information and make timely decisions.

A key advantage of a Modern AI strategy is its potential for significant cost reductions. By automating tasks, minimizing errors, and enhancing resource allocation, it contributes to streamlined operations and improved profitability.

Adopting a Modern AI strategy represents a transformative shift in business operations and strategic planning. It's more than just upgrading systems; it's embracing a responsive, agile, and profitable approach to conducting business. The potential of Modern AI goes beyond operational improvements - it paves the way for business transformation and sets a new standard for excellence.

Implementing Modern AI with Graft

In the world of AI, simplicity and efficiency are paramount. Graft's Modern AI Platform is designed to offer you just that. With Graft, implementing your Modern AI strategy has never been simpler. Whether you're a ML professional or a novice, you can leverage the full power of AI to drive growth and innovation. With just a few clicks, you can build high-quality AI solutions using the power of foundation models, without needing ML expertise.

Unlike traditional AI, which often requires extensive technical knowledge and starts from scratch for each solution, our Modern AI platform leverages pre-trained foundation models, prioritizes a data-centric method over intricate machine learning mechanics, and offers a comprehensive, end-to-end system that seamlessly integrates with the production environment, making AI more accessible, scalable, and efficient.

Now you can significantly reduce the time and resources required to build, deploy, manage, and monitor AI applications with our full-lifecycle production AI system.

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Last Updated

March 7, 2024

Further reading

JD Prater

Head of Marketing

JD writes about his experience using and building AI solutions. Outside of work, you'll find him spending time with his family, cycling the backroads of the Santa Cruz mountains, and surfing the local sandbars. Say hi on LinkedIn.

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