A Roadmap to Artificial Intelligence: Navigating Core Impacts to Successfully Transform Organisations

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a highly disruptive technology that will have major effects on the business world over the coming years. It has the potential to allow companies to achieve major efficiency gains and a more productive workforce through automating existing processes, providing deeper levels of analytics, providing better customer support, and increasing security. On the other hand, it may lead to lower staff levels and a drop in existing employee morale. Given the complexities of these projects, AI will only benefit organisations if they understand its capabilities in addition to its shortcomings. This investigation addresses the predicted impact on skills, roles and employee morale of artificial intelligence on the workforce of the future as AI continues to become more prevalent in our society.
 We investigate these impacts of AI specifically across four key industries by engaging in interviews with experts in the field to answer two research questions: (i) What are the core impacts of introducing AI systems in the workplace?, and; (ii) How can organisations develop AI projects for successful transformation? The inclusion strategy for this research were professionals who were highly knowledgeable in the area, and from our findings we were able to identify several impacts that AI made to companies developing these projects; namely employment levels, workforce morale, and process efficiency. With these insights, we subsequently developed a roadmap which contains the recommended steps and decisions that are necessary for successfully introducing AI to an organisation. This roadmap visualises the key decisions and steps that are critical for any AI based initiative for organisations, which will provide practitioners with a higher level of understanding of what is expected, in addition to enabling more effective collaboration with the system developers. Furthermore, this roadmap allows organisations to take a positive and proactive approach to designing these systems with their workforce in mind and to prepares them for the implications with the development, deployment, and use of these AI systems.