AI Agency Roadmap to Success
Is an Agency Relationship Right for You?
An AI agency relationship is a partnership between a client company and a technology services provider.
Agencies deliver several benefits, including the below:
- Access to on-demand expert resources. This may include data scientists, technology architects, business analysts and subject matter experts. You only pay for what you use, and you can scale up or scale down resources as needed.
- Access to proven deployment methodologies, best practices and performance benchmarks.
- Combining the above two benefits results in achieving bigger results in much less time.
- Leveraging experts also lets the client focus on their core competencies and products.
How an AI Agency Can Deliver for Your Company
A good agency helps your company implement artificial intelligence technology.
A great agency helps your company apply artificial intelligence to achieve the company's most important business objectives.
Johnny Grow is an AI agency that helps clients align technology for business outcomes.
But what exactly are those outcomes and how are they achieved with this technology?
Every client is unique, but most clients want to use artificial intelligence to grow revenues and reduce costs.
There are four ways to grow company revenues. You can increase customer acquisitions, grow customer lifetime value, lower customer churn, or modify your prices.
There are three ways to reduce costs. But for most companies the single biggest cost reduction driver is to increase staff productivity.
Each of these revenue and cost goals can be aided and accelerated with AI. Here's how.
Johnny Grow Ascend
To help our clients maximize technology and financial impact in the least time, cost and risk, we apply a 4-step methodology called Ascend.
Each step builds upon the prior. That creates momentum and disproportionately more powerful results.
It also shifts your AI adoption from what can look like a random pursuit to an orchestrated, automated and scalable program.
Ascend is business led and technology driven.
We know from more than two decades of experience that implementing AI in a technology vacuum disappoints. Instead, the technology must be directly aligned with best practices and metrics to deliver the most important user, customer and company results.
Simply acquiring new technology isn't going to improve your business any more than acquiring high priced canvas and paints is going to make you a Picasso.
Here are the four steps to supercharge your AI program.
Start with Business Outcomes
Success is not measured by AI technology capabilities.
It's measured by the problems solved or the business outcomes from the technology. Those outcomes include things like increased customer acquisitions, customer lifetime value, customer retention and staff productivity.
So, our AI consultants start by identifying and prioritizing our clients' business goals. We sequence those goals into an AI strategy. The strategy is like a roadmap that assembles the goals into use cases, metrics and ROI forecasts.
If you start with the end in mind, whether the above outcomes or something different, you are significantly more likely to achieve your goals. You will also make your technology adoption both successful and sustainable.
Failing to directly link the technology with business processes and metrics will leave you with a tool and not much more.
Apply Use Cases
Once we know the business outcomes desired, we focus on the use cases to achieve them.
We apply a collection of use cases and technology accelerators. For example, for business growth objectives, we start with the use cases below.
To prioritize use cases, we weight them by investment, time to value, complexity and payback.
For most clients we implement between 2 and 4 use cases in parallel.
For clients that seek business transformation, we focus on use cases that most directly impact customer interactions. That means use cases that directly impact how customer facing staff work. If you improve how work gets done by the employees that sell, deliver and support your customers, your upstream business objectives will be realized.
This bottom to top approach also aids your company culture, reduces change management obstacles and facilitates scale.
Precision Execution for Fastest Results
The next step is to organize use cases into a prescriptive plan. A good plan will show how use cases work together to drive synergies, reduce cost and accelerate time to value. The plan should also prescribe the metrics that will measure progress and forecasted payback.
Below is the Johnny Grow Blueprint model that drives our systemic and predictable execution.
This approach provides a clear roadmap to turn strategic but what can look like nebulous and elusive goals into measurable results. It also includes work breakdown structure (WBS), milestones, benchmarks and metrics so progress can be measured in real time.
It's an easy to use and balanced combination of business strategy and tactical execution.
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. — Sun Tzu
Evolve with an AI Tech Stack
Selecting the right artificial intelligence technologies can quickly become overwhelming. Two steps will simplify the process.
First, as advised in the prior steps, begin with clear and measurable goals. It's then much easier to find the best tech to achieve them.
Second, it's probably unrealistic to procure every application at once. So, define their value using an AI Tech Stack.
A tech stack should deliver several benefits.
- It allows you to define technologies by the value they produce. This then creates a roadmap where you acquire technologies based on a multiple-year plan.
- It defines a holistic software portfolio. This is far better than the more typical approach of acquiring a mixture of ad hoc and piecemeal systems.
- Somewhat related to the above point, a strategically designed tech stack will define the fewest technologies to achieve the most objectives.
- It lowers your overall IT cost and future proofs technology decisions.
The point of a tech stack is to procure technology in a sequence and pursuant to a plan. Rather than buy apps because they sound great or solve the problem of the day, they are adopted in a planned order where each app builds upon the prior. It's a tech strategy that will result in less maintenance, lower total cost of ownership, higher utilization and much higher ROI.
The Point is This
Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology that can drive quantum leap improvements to business strategies and operational execution. However, recognize that technology deployed in a vacuum misses the mark.
Partnering with an AI Agency is less about implementing tools and technologies and more about applying them to get top line revenue growth and bottom-line profit impact.
"On time and on budget" only matter if you are "on target and on value." That’s why our DNA is a mix of strategy, process and technology. All three factors are needed to create the perfect storm for company growth and business transformation.