• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 3 hours ago

If you’re reading this, you’re in the same boat right now, regardless of your role or your title.  You are being tasked to rethink how you do your job in the face of AI.  It might be overt, where your colleagues or management are asking you to figure it out, or it may be more subtle in a way that your gut knows this change is necessary, but you don’t know where to begin.

Don’t worry.  Everyone around you is suffering the same pressure, and the answer is simpler than you might think.

AI is changing rapidly, and the ways you can harness it for your own purposes are changing just as rapidly.  As a result, the idea of making a big bet on a full-blown transformation seems like a misstep.  You need more time to let the dust settle.  

Large-scale, dramatic change requires planning, resources, and time.  These are three commodities that most companies don’t have in the face of AI.  I understand that it’s OK to put together a team and attempt to build a plan, but you must enable your teams.  In fact, you have to empower them to identify small changes and iterate in a manner that shows impact in a more immediate time frame.  That creates a series of small wins that can build into a success story over time, and that mitigates the risk inherent in a large-scale transformation attempt. 

Your people know their roles well.  If you empower them to look for ways to create efficiency and integrate AI, they will.  If you enable this on a broad scale, those efficiencies add up and create a more effective organization horizontally. 

This type of transformation can affect the bottom line much more quickly than any top-down edict crafted in a boardroom and rolled out with PowerPoint decks and town hall meetings. 

That bottom-up approach is more effective and delivers results more quickly, while also avoiding wasting huge amounts of money and resources as the technology evolves beyond where it was when you began implementing your plan.

I call this the “healing-by-a-thousand-band-aids” approach (the opposite of death by a thousand cuts).  It involves identifying problems -- regardless of how small and seemingly unimportant -- in your company's overall process, and then solving them.  When you add up the small, independently solved problems, you end up with a fully re-architected approach that creates exponentially better efficiency across the board.  With this model, you do risk layering middleware on top of middleware, but in many cases, with AI automation tools at our disposal now, you can clean all that up very quickly.

Think about integrating AI, creative element-by-element, so your designers can create each piece and then assemble them into an output (tools like Figma now allow this).   Think about handling bid optimization, reporting outputs, and triggering alerts for your team.  Each of these is automatable with AI, and each can solve a small issue that, when done piece by piece, adds up to significant savings in time and resources.

This approach doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a macro strategy in place too, but that macro-strategy should focus on the end goal rather than the journey to get there.   The journey can be organic while the end outcome is the goal you are looking to achieve.