The use of artificial intelligence (AI), and conversational AI, in particular, is becoming more and more of an essential component of growing businesses. Building a Center of Excellence (CoE) assists in centralizing the process and keeping the focus on the business. However, facilitating this can be easier said than done, so let's dive into the seven best tips for building a conversational AI Center of Excellence.
Your conversational AI CoE can be thought of as the core knowledge platform for your business. This knowledge platform contains all of the information from past technological and conversational AI initiatives. It uses them to drive the company forward in using conversational AI and to create a clearer vision moving forward in your business's strategy. It enables your team and facilities to consistently deliver solutions that fit your business' needs. Your CoE can drive revenue, create cost efficiencies, enhance your customer experience, and give your company a competitive edge.
Conversational AI is a strong candidate for commercial CoE due to its rapid expansion as a vital technology among various industries and enterprises. Companies across the globe are finding that no matter their industry, people want to utilize the power of conversational AI, harness its capabilities, and become involved with it.
Some organizations are bringing in their own conversational AI tools, platforms, and solutions, but in order to avoid waste, they need to orchestrate their buying processes better. On the other hand, some organizations are independently developing their own conversational AI solutions and budgets, so there is no assurance that accountability for spend or deployment exists for conversational AI.
These factors make a strong case for a conversational AI CoE when combined. A center of this capacity would include people from various business units (like data science, IT, and more). The goal would be to combine ideas, efforts, and budgets to create a well-orchestrated, well-developed, centralized approach to conversational AI to strengthen your organization and make processes more efficient for any and all involved parties (from the customer side to the team member side).
Below, we go over 7 tips for building a robust conversational AI Center of Excellence (CoE):
#1. Start by Assessing a Core Business Problem or Challenge
After you have made an assessment, you should create an outline of your company's vision, strategy, governance, and key stakeholders necessary for your chosen conversational AI solution to help with your business. Clearly define and outline the benefits of the implementation and adoption processes.
Next, determine the financial requirements and feasibility of the conversational AI Center of Excellence, understand the current state of conversational AI adoption and knowledge, and organize a committee of professionals to oversee the development of the CoE. Finally, set up governance and obtain approval and buy-ins from all key stakeholders (CTO, CEO, CIO, business unit leaders, etc.). Defining and laying out the governance structure and role of leaders will help you in the long run.
#2. Form a Multidisciplinary Staff
Many industries or enterprises have "citizen" scientists or technologically advanced team members to assist end-user departments. They often have a separate IT staff performing and controlling any conversational AI work. A Center of Excellence would bring all of these talents together into a single, collaborative, cooperative conversational AI unit.
This idea of a multidisciplinary team is applicable across solutions, engineering, products, product management, machine learning (ML), and data science and analytics. The entire professional community should be re-skilled and up-skilled to create further a conversational AI-ready mentality to progress forward.
#3. Standardize Tools and Methods
On the other hand, and possibly the downside that occurs when businesses opt for their IT to choose and purchase their own conversational AI solutions and tools, the selected solutions do not always integrate and operate well with each other and function cohesively across the company. This creates silos of data that are difficult to leverage across the company. A core mission of having a conversational AI Center of Excellence should be implementing standard solutions and tools so that every project can follow the same methodologies.
#4. Define CoE Outreach Strategies for Users and IT Teams
A Center of Excellence can quickly become secluded from the rest of a company. This can further create a "silo." To avoid this silo effect, analysis from your CoE should be assigned as liaisons to end business units and to IT departments. Continuous communication between your CoE and the rest of your organization ensures that your center is at the forefront of all departments and team members and becomes an integral part of the company culture.
#5. Enable an AI Life Cycle Approach
Conversational AI and big data are constantly growing in popularity and have become quite mainstream. Long were the days of pure experimentation; it is now time for conversational AI projects to be put into professional production and use.
An excellent way to do this is to borrow a page from traditional IT by using a project life cycle approach. This method can even be simplified down to the standard: define, develop, test, stage, and deploy-and-maintain methodologies for varying applications.
One problem with many modern conversational AI projects is that they tend to get stuck in a seemingly never-ending development-test-retest cycle, so they never quite make it into production (and tons of time and money are wasted). There should be more pressure among organizations for conversational AI applications to make it into production so that these apps can pay off in monetary gain and exposure for the company.
#6. RTB Goals
A Center of Excellence should include some projects or experimentation, but the end goal should always be to earn a return back to the business (RTB). To achieve this, conversational AI applications should be deployed in production, where they deliver measurable value to operations, revenues, product development, and strategies.
#7. Bi-Annual Operational Reviews
When you set up a new conversational AI-powered function, there are bound to be certain aspects that go perfectly and others that need to be tuned a little bit more. Initially, your business's Center of Excellence should be reviewed every six months to perfect tuneups, determine the progress that has been made, and reestablish goals for the upcoming six months. Ensure that your multidisciplinary team and your company-wide can also contribute feedback during these reviews. All feedback and contributions should be welcome to further perfect your business as a whole and all technological and AI-powered platforms and solutions.
As conversational AI innovation and technology continue to advance, a conversational AI CoE will enhance your business's key operational functions and become a core necessity for success. Having a conversational AI CoE will offer a competitive advantage in the conversational AI market, too, as well as continue to innovate and increase revenue opportunities!
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