Identifying AI Opportunities in Your Business

Hi there,

When it comes to finding valuable AI opportunities, the usual advice is to "hire an AI expert." Fair enough – AI can be overwhelming, especially for non-technical business leaders. And who would I be to doubt the value of AI consultants? I might be a little biased.

But what if you didn't need a consultant at every step? What if you could get 80% of the way of spotting potential use cases on your own, relying on experts only to fine-tune the last 20% and bring them to life?

In today's newsletter, I'll show you how to take the biggest steps by yourself. With the right framework – and a little help from AI itself – you'll be able to spot high-impact opportunities in no time.

Let's dive in!

Quick heads-up: If you want a shortcut and prefer a more interactive, in-depth version of this topic, check out my upcoming LIVE workshop on AI Capability Mapping. You'll apply everything in this newsletter, together with me.

Mapping AI Capabilities to Business Needs

At its core, finding valuable AI opportunities boils down to one idea:

Understanding what AI can do and how it aligns with your business needs. The sweet spot is where these two areas intersect.

To find that intersection, you should focus on two core elements that should already be well known to you if you're reading my newsletters frequently:

• AI Archetypes: These are the key AI capabilities, grouped by data type.

• Pain Points & Bottlenecks: These are the specific current and future challenges in your business that drive significant impact if solved.

By mapping these two elements together, you can discover where AI can genuinely make a difference.

Why Systematic Mapping Matters

As you know, I'm a big fan of moving fast and experimenting. You won't hear me suggest spending 6+ months on an "AI strategy" document. But I do believe in a focused effort up front to think things through.

For example, this could be an AI Design Sprint™ or just a series of focused workshop sessions that you conduct by yourself - like I'm showing you here. The goal is that you (and ideally your team) walk through your key business challenges and build a shared understanding of how AI could potentially address them.

This allows you to move forward fast, but with clarity and purpose. A systematic mapping of AI capabilities to your needs allows you t discover new applications you hadn't considered and avoid costly mistakes by ensuring AI solutions are relevant to your problems.

It's about thinking deeper than just "AI will automate this for us". It's about finding where AI can deliver the most value and avoiding situations where AI is applied without a relevant business challenge (a.k.a "solution looking for problem"-mode), or where too much effort is spent solving a problem that AI is not well-suited for (which happens over and over again).

Where to Look for AI Opportunities

Once you understand the AI archetypes and have a clear view of your business's pain points & bottlenecks, you're ready to start the high-level mapping process.

Here's how it essentially works:

Step 1: Start with a simple table

To start, focus on a single process, product, or business unit set up a simple table.

In the columns, list out the AI archetypes – Supervised Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Vision, etc.

In the rows, list the stages of a specific workflow, the steps in a user journey, or the departments in a business unit. For instance, in the RFP example we covered last week, the stages might include "RFP Analysis & Requirement Gathering", "Team & Task Assignment", "Research & Outline Development", "Draft Creation & Review" etc.

Of course, if you're looking at multiple processes, products, or departments, you would create multiple of these tables.

Step 2: Map AI Archetypes Using Action Words

Once your table is set up, go through each step (row) and review the pain points and bottlenecks you've identified before. Brainstorm if and how a specific AI capability could improve it.

Use action words specific to each AI archetype to simplify the process. These words capture the core functionality of each archetype:

Using these action words as a guide, ask yourself:

Could this AI capability relieve a pain point or remove a bottleneck for this particular step?

For now, don't get bogged down in detail. Keep the description to a sentence, but make sure you tie the archetype back to an existing problem. For example, in the RFP Analysis step, "Forecast" from supervised machine learning could help improve project timeline estimation, while "Chat" from generative AI could help you to "chat with your RFP documents". Be sure to leave fields blank if they don't fit!

Pro Tip: Use ChatGPT

This is where it gets interesting. With your table, pain points & bottlenecks and list of action words in place, you've already created the perfect template to effectively leverage tools like ChatGPT to act as an 'AI expert' and guide you through refining and expanding your mapping exercise. ChatGPT can help you brainstorm more specific AI solutions tailored to each process step, give you ideas you might not have thought of, and provide a deeper analysis of how certain archetypes might fit. This is a junior AI consultant at your fingertips! Make sure you use it to get unstuck in this mapping exercise.

For example, here's how ChatGPT would have filled in the table below. It's not too bad, is it? If you do this exercise for each relevant department and only now bring in an AI consultant, they can work 10x more effectively for you! I'll share the exact GPT and prompts I use for this in my AI Capability Mapping workshop.

Step 3: Gather Insights

By mapping AI opportunities this way, you gain two important insights:

1. Most Relevant AI Archetypes: The mapping exercise will reveal which types of AI have the highest potential for impact based on your unique business needs.

2. Most Relevant Steps for Improvement: The mapping highlights specific steps, or departments where AI can deliver the most value, helping you prioritize your initiatives.

For example, let’s revisit our RFP AI Capability Mapping:

From a technology perspective (columns), we can see that the AI Archetype "Generative AI" (and we can actually subsume NLP here as well) is most important because it touches most process steps.

From a process perspective (rows) we can see that the first step "RFP Analysis & Requirement Gathering" is a good candidate for AI augmentation because a lot of the pain points here can be addressed.

So applying Generative AI to the first process step seems like a great starting point for our AI initiative!

Start by yourself, bring in expertise as needed

Can you go through this process alone? Absolutely! Should you still seek expert help? For sure! Treat this as a "quick start" exercise. Any AI consultant will be able to help you much more efficiently once this groundwork has been done. And you can use their expertise much more effectively to "fine-tune" your mapping and move more quickly to the next phase, which is to develop use case factsheets that also address the feasibility of your initiatives.

Which brings us to the next point.

What’s next?

Once you’ve created your high-level AI Capability Mapping, the next step will be developing detailed use case fact sheets for the areas you want to focus on – but that's a topic for another newsletter.

For now, you've laid a solid foundation for identifying where AI can make a real difference in your business.

I encourage you to fill out your table for a simple process or workflow that affects your daily work, brainstorm a few archetypes, and see firsthand how AI could create immediate impact.

And if you want to see more examples in action, don’t let the chance pass to join my upcoming LIVE workshop. This opportunity will expire on Oct 21. So grab you seat now.

Until then - happy mapping, and:

See you next Friday!
Tobias