Insights & White Papers

AI Technology Advancement Enables Businesses to Leapfrog the Competition

By Scott Albrecht

Business & Technology Strategy

Traditional enterprise software upgrade cycles have been the same for many years and are seen as a necessary expense for businesses to stay competitive and up to date. This cycle is both costly and time-consuming, as businesses must purchase and install expensive licenses.

Liberty’s studies of mid-market and large companies show that, on average, 2% of revenue on IT.  Of that 2%, 90% is spent on keep-the-lights-on IT endeavors, such as maintenance, support, licensing, etc.  Only 10% is spent on true innovation projects.  Spending a paltry 0.2% of revenue on IT innovation has kept enterprises in many industries tied to these cycles.

With the Cambrian explosion of compute power, open-source technology, and widely available AI algorithms, pioneering companies are taking advantage of the current opportunity to leverage tech to leapfrog their peers.

New business models, automated processes, reduction in time to market cycles, and cloud-first mindsets have allowed innovative corporations to shift their spend away from these enterprise upgrade cycles.  With the cost savings generated from implementing AI solutions, your business can shift the focus into other innovation projects, or core competencies to

By now, you have heard of OpenAI, and their product ChatGPT.  It is on the news, on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and likely being used by people in your firm.  This product, and others like it are changing the landscape of almost every white-collar function across the enterprise.

ChatGPT is a conversational AI platform that enables businesses to automate their customer service, marketing, and other enterprise software functions. It utilizes natural language processing and deep learning to understand user queries and generate responses in real-time. This makes it easier for businesses to interact with customers, freeing up time and resources for other tasks.

However, there is hard work that needs to be done to prepare you to realize the gains that AI has to offer.  Namely, your data.  You have probably been told for at least a decade that “data is an asset,” that you must ensure that your data is well governed, clean, and complete.  Applying AI on top of poor data will ensure that the resulting output will not be viable for any of the functions you want it to perform.

With a small investment, you can have an open-source AI solution up and running to manage entire customer service functions.  However, if the data that you are training that algorithm on is poor, your results may steer your customers in the wrong direction and turn them away for good.

Maintaining clean, concise, and complete information about your product or service catalogue and an enriched set of information about your customers and their segmentation attributes will prepare you for your AI journey.

Enterprise AI must be trained on your internal data to be effective. ChatGPT is trained on hundreds of millions of data points from all over the internet and will not be an efficient alternative.  Still, the benefits of the technological implementation will have massive upside implications.  Many of these truly innovative implementations right around the corner.

By preparing your data, planning an innovation budget, and putting together a roadmap of how new technologies can disrupt your business processes, you are well on your way to leapfrogging the competitors who are spending 0.2% of revenue on innovative IT.

About Liberty Advisor Group

Liberty Advisor Group is a goal-oriented, client-focused and results-driven consulting firm. We are a lean, hand-picked team of strategists, technologists and entrepreneurs – battle-tested experts with a steadfast, start-up attitude. A team with an average experience of 15+ years with a proven track record in Business and Digital Strategy, Digital Transformation, Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, and Mergers and Acquisitions. Most recently, Liberty was recognized as one of the Best Small and Medium Workplaces in Chicago by Fortune Magazine and Best Places to Work in Chicago by Crain’s Chicago Business.

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Scott Albrecht By Scott Albrecht