I have been reading myriad reports and blog posts telling me all the fantastic AI use cases I, as a CIO, should consider investing in. I can’t help but think these use cases miss the point for medium-sized businesses.
My challenge with these use cases is that they tend to relate to organisations with deep pockets and large internal IT departments. I have neither. At Breast Cancer Network Australia, I have a small IT team with much of my operations and applications management outsourced.
AI has a role to play, but how do I create the financial and human capacity to invest in the exploration and education required?
When I look at my budget, outside of internal headcount and software licenses, my largest costs fall into three buckets. These are:
- Managed services of my infrastructure and operations
- Digital agency for user experience and user interface design
- Software development and support for my business applications
Every day, I am bombarded with examples of how organisations are 10x’ing their software development, UI design, and IT operations.
So, rather than me spending money on AI, is the first logical step to work with my partners to see how they are looking to use AI to increase the velocity and quality of output to me?
How is my managed service provider planning to use AI to gain insights into my infrastructure to identify problems, fix the root causes, decrease incidents and improve service levels?
How will my digital agency sense and respond to consumer behaviour to increase our member experience? How will they reduce the time and cost of delivering us UI designs?
How will my software development partner increase its output while making code that is more secure and easier to support?
How will my content management support partner work with my team to leverage AI to reduce the time and cost of tagging content to deliver personalised services?
While there are internal opportunities I know I can explore with AI, I want to start where I have the most to gain.
If you are a CIO of a medium-sized organisation, I would love to hear from you so we can share thoughts on these topics and possibly find areas we can collaborate.
Have you asked your partners how they use AI to deliver better outcomes?