What is AI consulting and why it is so important

The last decade has seen significant hype and attention focused on artificial intelligence (AI) andmachine learning (ML) and the transformative impact they will have on industry and customer. However, many business leaders find themselves confounded by this hype and confused as to what these technologies are, how they work, the business value they create and how to go about adopting such new capability. Compounded by the issue of low-supply, high-demand and cost to access data science and AI talent, it is unsurprising that the number of AI consultants and AI consulting firms is on the rise to help businesses outsource this expertise and get informed answersso that they can begin to develop a strategy and act.

Fundamentally, an AI consultancy is a collection of individuals with expertise in planning, developing, testing and deploying AI solutions, who are responsible for facilitating and accelerating your organisations adoption of AI, in a manner that aligns with your business objectives, data, technological feasibility and manages the inherent risk that comes with innovation and business transformation.

An AI consultancy should lead your AI journey through the ‘data science and AI wilderness’: helping plan the journey route, navigate uncertain terrain, manage risks to avoid potentially disastrous situations, anticipate challenges and come prepared with the right tools, efficiently manage resources along the way and recognise when real-world conditions require deviation from the plan and be readyand able to adapt to emerging demands and make sound decisions.

AI offers immense opportunity to transform business efficiency, productivity and growth and consultancies can play a key role in helping unlock these benefits. Let’s take a closer look at some critical ways in which partnering with an AI consultancy creates a competitive edge.

Why is AI consulting so important?

AI consultancies will help you identify and prioritise the most relevant opportunities for AI/ML to transformyour business

The size and scale of your organisation will have a direct impact on the scope of opportunities to leverage AI available. After all, the more products and services you offer, the more operations and processes involved in their delivery, the more systems and software involved to enable and facilitate, the more data that is captured across the end-to-end workflow, the more data your business accumulates that can be used by AI and ML.However, increased size and scale also translates to greater complexity and likelihood of inefficiencies and bottlenecks occurring in different areas and stages across your organisation – and more opportunity for automation and optimisation to resolve these issues.

Regardless of your business size, confronting ‘art of the possible’can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis. Indeed, mapping out all available opportunities is a manual and time-consuming task: one that is notnecessarily productive as not every opportunity is equal in terms of business impact and ROI.That is why a key role of an AI consultancy is to help you identify and prioritise those opportunities to leverage AI that best align with the most pressing business challenges and result in the greatestimpact on your business.

Exactly what those priorities are will be unique to each business depending on their industry, stage of maturity and unique challenges and business vision. On this point business leaders should be diligent: whilst learning about new AI use-cases and achievements is interesting and informative, don’t become distracted by novelty and remain focused on your business challenges. An AI consultancy can help you remain focused on determining and sticking to priorities and expanding focus once there is momentum and success.

AI consultancies will help manage the risk of adopting AI

As mentioned, not every potential AI opportunity will deliver equal value or ROI to your business if pursued. Similarly, not every opportunity is equal in terms of its complexityand risk.

Before you leap into an AI project, it is important to recognise that some opportunities are more complex and present greater risk than others. There may be several factors that impact on the risk associated with addressing a particular challenge using AI.

For example, a core requirement to solving your business challenge with AI is the high volumes of high quality and relevant data. This ‘raw’ or ‘wild’ data will then need to undergo processing and preparation to convert it into a usable input for AI and machine learning models so that it can generate high-quality output consistently. However, if your datasources are siloed, incomplete, contain errors or redundant data, this will impact on project feasibility and risk.

Another potential risk factor is how well established and validated the relevant AI domain is to solve your problem. AI is a rapidly evolving discipline and whilst some use-cases and applications are well established and could be considered relatively low-risk, others are highly innovative and cutting edge which entails higher risk that needs to be mitigated. Also, just because another organisation has a case study touting success with a particular use-case, this does not automatically mean your business will be able to achieve the same success. Your success with an AI project will ultimately depend on your data, the complexity of transforming that data into useful output and your willingness to invest in development.

Assessing the complexity and risk associated with using AI to address a specific business challenge, anticipating potential risk factors, planning mitigation tactics, developing contingency plans and knowing when a specific initiative is no longer viable.

AI consultancies will help translate goals and objectives into strategy and action

A quick google search for AI will yield hundreds of thousands of results on different AI use-cases, techniques, applications, technologies, benefits and vendors. Whilst this information can be useful to inform a general understanding of AI and the competitive landscape, many will find it to be information overload and largely irrelevant. Although this information may be interesting, it offers very little in terms of progressing you towards addressing the business need. After all, there’s little value in knowing that your business problem requires machine vision,natural language processing (NLP) or any other AI/ML technique if you have no idea how to plan or act on this information.

This is where the knowledge and expertise AI consultancies offer is invaluable. AI consultancies are responsible for translating your business challenges into an actionable strategy and development roadmap that considershow your organisation DNA –data sources, operations, systems, software and infrastructure – and business goals shape the development and implementation roadmap.

When it comes to AI strategy, one size does not fit all and your AI strategy should reflect your business vision, short and long-term goals, and the type and degree of risk you are willing to accept.

For example, if your goal is to find a solution to your business challenge as fast as possibleor you are highly risk averse and seek to only use validated solutions on the market, your AI strategy may focus on leveraging off-the-shelf (OTS) AI solutions to minimise development and integration requirements and mitigate risk. Alternatively, if your aim is to build, commercialise and retain the IP for a new technology, your strategy should reflect this by focusing on the relevance of open-source solutions or developing custom technologies.

An AI consultancy should also flag the risks inherent to each approach. For the first example, your ability to offer services to your customers may be negatively impacted if a third-party provider you rely on goes out of business, ceases to offer their service or increases their prices. What’s more, this approach may be faster and cost effective in the long-term but may provemore expensive and inflexible in the long-term as your business offering is dependent on a third party (who may decide it’s lucrative to become your competitor). In the second example, under-taking development yourself provides flexibility, enables you to customise according to your development requirements and means you own what you build: but also means you own all the development risk. In the end no approach is entirely right or wrong – it all comes down to the business needs and context.

Final word:

Artificial intelligence is complex, fast moving and the strategy you choose to follow has short and long-term consequences for your business that are not always immediately visible. Whether you’re just beginning to ask questions about the role AI can play in your business or have begun your AI journey and need help addressing a complex new challenge, partnering with an AI consultancy can help ensure your next AI project is a success.