McKinsey’s latest podcast on how firms with an innovation-focused culture are powering ahead of competitors is worth a listen.
Here is a summary:
Companies with strong innovation cultures are far ahead of their peers in deploying and benefiting from generative AI (gen AI). A recent McKinsey article finds that top innovators excel at harnessing gen AI to drive growth by:
1. Asking good questions and understanding what business problems gen AI can solve
2. Challenging gen AI outputs and weeding out bad or nonsensical answers
3. Continually building proprietary data to feed into gen AI models
4. Learning and iterating quickly using agile test-and-learn approaches
5. Automating workflows with minimal human touch points
To emulate these leaders, companies earlier in their gen AI journeys should:
– Establish regulatory and data security guardrails first
– Identify high-impact use cases where gen AI can provide strategic advantage
– Form cross-functional teams to spot issues and embed control functions
– Start with 1-2 use cases with lower proprietary data needs, then expand
– Hire to fill skill gaps in analytics, collaboration, learning and vision
– Instill innovation practices like metered funding and celebrating noble failures
– Have leaders set direction on where gen AI acceleration can be most impactful
– Get hands-on experience actually using gen AI to jumpstart adoption
