There are no shortcuts

When AI became available to the general public in 2022, it was not much yet. At the time we built chatbots for the websites of local businesses. People found it a fun tool and enjoyed chatting with it, but it was not more than that. The chatbot gave wrong answers more often than right ones and came across as dumb more than once. Fun to play with, but nowhere near valuable for businesses yet.

Even so, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing software ever, with 100 million users in two months. Hundreds of billions of euros went into its development and the models improved at a rapid pace. So fast, in fact, that they cracked mathematical problems that had gone unanswered for years and forced breakthroughs in diseases researchers had been working on for decades. In recent years these models became so good that they started writing their own code. Development is exponential and it looks like this will continue.

What this will mean for the economy and the world, nobody knows exactly. What we do know: it changes businesses and the way we work completely. It is already doing so. Tasks that took hours, patterns in data you would never see with the naked eye, personalisation at a scale that was not possible before. Those are huge opportunities. Companies that use this well move faster, better and more efficiently than companies that do not.

The three-legged chair

That AI is getting smarter fast and will change how we work and live is no longer a question for most people. The question is how you respond to it as well as possible.

In four years our colleague Finn went from building the first chatbots to guiding the AI implementation at Beiersdorf, the parent company behind Nivea. We have been part of projects that never got past the pilot phase, and projects that saved every colleague hours. What we learned above all is that there are no shortcuts. Several things have to come together.

• Data as the foundation
• Solutions that connect to that data and those systems
• People with concrete skills

It is a chair with three legs. If one is missing, the chair falls over. We saw that happen far too often over the past years. Do you still not see the result you want despite all the effort? Then one of these three is probably missing. An example: you have implemented an AI model, but not connected it to your data and systems. Then you have a very smart assistant that knows nothing about your company. Or you have trained your team, but not put in place a solution that fits your systems. Then the real value fails to appear as well.

Laid out like this it seems logical, but getting all three right takes time and expertise and still goes wrong too often in practice. So look for a partner who focuses on all three. Because if the past four years have taught us one thing, it is that only that combination leads to change and the result you want.