So You Want to Do AI in Your Organization?

What Literacy Level is your Organization at?

Given the ‘rise’ of Artificial Intelligence, seriously no thanks to GenAI, a lot of companies, organizations and even governments want to jump on the bandwagon. Businesses will be looking at using AI to earn more and reduce expenses, while governments hope that it can become a driver for economic and job growth.

While an AI project can fail in many ways, one of the common reasons they fail is due to the lack of foundation. What do I mean? Over here I will be sharing a small framework that will show your organization how to build a foundation that is needed to continuously gain advantage from your digital transformation effort, and the data your organization collects along the way and if AI becomes the necessary technology solution, there is a low probability of it failing.

Here goes!

Literacy Level

Step 1: Technology Literacy

Before any organization wants to take advantage of digital transformation, it is important for an organization to work on enterprise-level Technology Literacy.

“Technology is the ability to use, manage, understand, assess technology.” ~Wikipedia

If you have been using computers as part of your work, it does not mean that you are literate in technology. During COVID, I have seen folks who do not know how to share a screen during an online meeting, or typing a function on Excel. Organizations should not underestimate, but be prepared, for the lack of technology literacy because before this Knowledge Economy era, as long as you perform well in your tasks you are hired. That is how the Industrial Age works.

Step 2: Digital Literacy

In a Knowledge Economy, knowledge and information is a key factor to success. So the next literacy to work on will be Digital Literacy.

“Digital Literacy is an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information using typing or digital platform.” ~ Wikipedia

Knowing how to curate information online will be important and will prove to be useful as we move down to the next few steps/literacy. Without this literacy, employees will be inundated with information very quickly and are very unlikely to be self-sufficient which can cause a downstream impact.

Step 3: Data Literacy

After your digital transformation effort materializes, the next step in the framework is to start taking advantage of the data that is generated by your digital process.

“Data Literacy is the ability to read, understand, create, and communicate data as information.” ~Wikipedia

It is important to understand what information signal the data can provide and also its limitations, or how much the signal goes. Employees will need to understand how data works, followed by the need to manage data quality and how to manage it as an important asset. This will be important as they start using data to make decisions in their daily work. Not forgetting that AI uses a lot of data, and we all can always cite, “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

Having as high as possible data literacy will serve an organization well later when they move to the next literacy level.

Step 4: AI Literacy

“AI Literacy is the ability to understand, use, monitor, and critically reflect on AI applications.” ~ Wikipedia

Well if you manage to come to planning and increasing your AI Literacy level in your organization, a word of “Congratulations!” is in order here because it is not an easy journey and there is a very good chance the organization might have undergone restructuring to achieve it.

However, work is just starting if you are keen to adopt AI in your organization. You have now started to work on moving up an organization-level learning curve on AI and the more use cases the organization has the faster it can climb up the learning curve, and not forgetting the fact that like any IT project, AI projects have a thousand and one ways to fail, the more eyes looking at it the better.

Conclusion

To conclude, there are four levels of literacy an organization has to move through before it can take advantage of AI. They are technology, digital, data, and AI. By now you will have felt that they are one after another, however, the good news is this. The whole organization need not be literate at one first before moving to the next. Start by assessing the literacy level of each department/team, whether are they proficient enough before moving to the next level, and whether there is a need to move to the next level.

Based on my current experience, most organizations will move towards data literacy with a few selected departments needing to move to AI Literacy. Is this good news? It depends. :)

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