Realising the value of AI in your organisation is going to require more than technology skills. Are you planning for the entrepreneurial capabilities required to maximise the strategic value for your business?
A conversation about AI yesterday with Scott Ward, a long time collaborator, helped me to further flesh out my recent post on Forward Deployed Entrepreneurs. Scott and I were discussing the need to shape AI investment to realise strategic value and the importance of breakthrough business model transformation as cost out becomes more marginal for many organisations as token costs rise.
The Three Roles of the Forward Deployed Entrepreneur
The literature of Entrepreneurship has done a good job of describing the combination of skills required for disruptive innovation at scale. That formula has resolved to:
- Hustlers – the strategists, business model, growth and commercial experts who help realise the value of the solution
- Designers (or for alliteration Hipsters) – the human insights and the ability to construct human friendly experiences and narratives into a product, process or experience
- Hackers – the wranglers of the technical components of product, process and experience
In many start-ups these are three separate functions but many entrepreneurs combine elements of each to drive their solutions forward at an early stage. Successful AI initiatives are going to require all three capabilities in teams or more rarely in a single individual.
These three capabilities describe what your Forward Deployed Entrepreneurs must do.
Why these capabilities?
Let’s look at each capability in turn in the context of the strategic value of AI:
Hustler: The capabilities of the hustler are important to your AI initiative because they help shape the value that you are pursuing by answering questions like:
- How does this initiative help fulfil our strategy?
- What value are we seeking to create?
- How might we release constraints in our business with AI?
- Do we need to transform our business model or value chain?
- How are we going to leverage this new capability with our customers and what are the implications for our commercial models?
- What are the likely reactions from current and future competitors and imitators?
To address these questions either directly or to experiment and iterate to answers, hustlers need deep commercial savvy, strategic nous and an ability to understand and reshape business models and economics. Linda Grattan recently noted that AI demands CEO level skills and attention. Hustlers also need the resilience and the energy to continue to advocate, sell and grow gage customers and other stakeholders.
Designer: The AI challenge for business is not a technical one. It must also be a human one because we expect AI to co-exist with colleagues, customers and other stakeholders. AI’s role must be designed to reassure reluctant users and allow for real human emotions which are often much more critical in processes than pure rational calculations. Designers can answer questions like:
- What do we want people to feel in this experience and how might we support that?
- How do we build trust in this experience?
- What are the moments where we allow for a human to override or escape the AI conclusions if they disagree or have concerns?
- How do we shape the processes and experiences to achieve all of the outcomes we are seeking?
- What proprietary elements will we add to the experience of a generic LLM to reflect our unique brand, voice and desired experience?
- What are the regulatory and compliance obligations we need to meet as we use AI in this context?
- How do we make sure that the workload left for humans is not overwhelming in terms of volume or complexity?
Designers help our the AI use cases in a human context to achieve the desired outcomes and to make sure that the experience remains attractive to customers and other employees.
Hacker: AI is rapidly changing technology and you are going to need excellent technology skills to tame it, shape it safely and to ensure that any advantages you accrue are for your business and not to the benefit of the model. Your hacker, or Forward Deployed Engineer, will need to address questions like:
- How do we retain flexibility to avoid becoming hostage to one LLM provider or one model?
- How do we prevent unwanted access to our data and our confidential information?
- How do we ensure that the model works consistently as expected through platforms, harnesses and other guidance to the calls upon the model?
- How do we work across the silos of our current legacy technology architecture to leverage AI for experiences that bridge them all?
- How do we monitor, test and maintain the complex and new infrastructure that will be required?
- How do we keep the costs of our new tokens under control?
There’s evidently a lot for the technology capabilities to do as they bridge legacy and new technology to achieve business outcomes and keep everyone safe in a radical new world.
More than one Person
Realising radical transformation using AI is much more than a technical challenge. As noted above, it likely involves more than one person’s capabilities and the skills across the breadth of the organisation. You may be lucky to have one magical Forward Deployed Entrepreneur but you are likely to need a squad.
AI offers the potential to change business models, do things that haven’t been possible before, and release constraints in current businesses. You will need a diverse range of capabilities on your teams to see and realise these opportunities. Start by leveraging the skills of Forward Deployed Entrepreneurs – Hustlers, Designers and Hackers.
