AI for Orchestrators - Newsletter #11

The latest AI insights for Business Leaders and Organisational Orchestrators.

Staccato provocation…

There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in your business. Given the rapidly evolving capabilities in AI at low cost, the exploitation challenge is more of a mindset issue. Do you want to do something about it or not…?

Hello Business Orchestrators!

Friction’s on my mind…Boards and Leadership teams need to be examining possibilities for removing it across their various business processes. Evolving AI capabilities from LLMs, and those being baked into new releases of enterprise software, can give early explorers a competitive edge. But remember, baselines and assumptions about business change pretty fast. Soon, a lot of these new wow-factor AI capabilities will be standard productivity tools…until the next big thing…I’m betting on a combination of autonomous agents and world simulation tools (SORA, Genie etc) to bring forth the next big wave.

What happens when you remove friction in your team’s activities? Well, you release capacity for one thing, enabling your employees to apply their creative talents in more productive ways that can scale. There’s no single pill or use case. You have to figure it out. But you know your business better than anyone else…until someone else comes along and reimagines a new cheaper, more scaleable way of addressing the market’s needs. Or creating new ones.

Anyway, lets get to the news that’s been grabbing my attention this last week, and is informing the agenda for some of the customer workshops I am running in the coming week. And remember…look behind the news items. Consider the underlying shifts, the deceptive periods (which are getting shorter) which lead to exponential growth and disruption of the incumbents!

This weeks attention grabbers:

• Klarna, the Swedish buy now/pay later service announced that its new AI assistant is doing the work of 700 full-time agents. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I recommend heading over to YouTube for some early perspectives. The All-In Podcast is a good place to start (minute 53:50).

• ChatGPT use cases keep opening up new avenues for removing friction in business activities. Consider the new ElevenLabs text-to-speech GPT in the GPT store. Check the YouTube demo from Corbin. I tested it and it’s impressive. Remember, this is the worst it will ever be. Meaning, you can bet on it getting better, fast. Marketeers and Comms teams, as well as international organisations, have another converging set of tools in their pockets.

• Baselines & assumptions need to keep changing based on the non-stop march of generative AI. Here’s a summary I made from my “Challenger” series of customer workshops, on my YouTube channel - The Nordic Bridge.

• Microsoft’s new CoPilot for CFOs aims to remove friction from the process of financial management of the business. Speeding things up, giving greater insights faster, and democratising complex financial analysis across the rest of the team by augmenting lower level employees. Venture Beat has more.

• Look beyond the gaming demo aspects of Google’s new Genie AI, and it’s ability to learn how to interact with games. This has profound implications for business simulation. MIT Technology Review offers some perspectives. Project your mind forward 6 months…

5 (rolling) questions for Organisational Orchestrators: How can you reduce friction in your business

1. Where are the biggest slowdowns in your current operations, and how can generative AI be applied to streamline these areas without complicating the process?

2. Can generative AI play a role in dismantling silos between functions or partners, making it easier and faster to share crucial data and insights?

3. What are the common hurdles in adopting new technologies in your workflows, and how can generative AI be leveraged to minimise these disruptions?

4. How can we use generative AI to cut down on the time-to-market for your R&D projects, ensuring a smoother path from concept to deployment?

5. In implementing generative AI, what steps will you take to simplify compliance with legal and ethical standards, ensuring your efforts to remove friction don’t create new obstacles?

Bonus mind map of the questions above, generated in ChatGPT with whimsical plugin:

Staccato Burst…

You can target incumbent’s market positions by re-imagining how to get to the end goal. Often, the incumbent’s businesses, and cost base, has built up over many years, like rock sediment. This makes them slow to respond to market shifts and new opportunity. Their friction is your accelerated business opportunity. You get there by capitalising on all of the new AI capabilities at your finger tips, available at a very low cost…(relative to their OPEX and decision making processes).

That’s all for this week. If you’re curious you can also check out more insights from The Nordic Bridge on YouTube on the organisational implications from applying (or not applying) GenAI…