If you’re running a business today, you’ve probably considered it. Maybe not actively, intentionally, but it’s popped up into your mind. AI.
Could it work for your company?
During a session Tuesday at MEMA’s Commercial Vehicle Outlook Conference in Pontiac, Mich., Maryam Khan Meurer, founder and CEO at Axle Mobility, and Bill Currence, founder and managing partner at Cornerstone Consulting, shared their expertise on why AI is worth considering for supplier operations and how it can work.
Kicking off her comments, Khan Meurer says it’s important to first understand what AI is — and what it isn’t. She points to LinkedIn here as a common influencer, filled equally with comments about how AI is panacea for all business challenges or unusable trash designed to win your business and nothing more. She says the answer is somewhere in between. AI is incredibly valuable when properly deployed but must be implemented intelligently.
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Khan Meurer says a successful AI deployment must answer these three questions:
- Do the business outcomes matter? Starting here, she says “the answer has to be yes.” Whether AI is being used to reduce the time it takes to conduct a task, increase revenue for a project, transfer knowledge or data across a workforce, or something else, Khan Meurer says AI shouldn’t be employed if its outcomes don’t matter.
- Is there a narrow workflow? “I cannot emphasize this enough. It has to be embarrassingly narrow,” Khan Meurer says. She says AI works best when its task can be distilled into a single focused, directive. But it can’t be vague. “Optimize parts spend” for example is a terrible directive she says because that can be done so many ways. AI works best if you find one area that impacts parts spend where AI can influence an outcome and focus it entirely on that space.
- Does it make users lives better? Khan Meurer adds that matters too and shouldn’t be overlooked. If an AI tool doesn’t reduce an employee’s workload, or forces them to work differently but not more efficiently, it might be working improperly or not at all. AI should improve automation, augment employee action and accelerate decision making.
How AI should be leveraged in business to driving operational success.Axle Mobility
Khan Meurer says 90% of internal AI deployments that fail do so because they fail to answer one of these questions.
Additionally, Currence notes AI is generally only as good as the people supporting it. In the parts business, that means using your internal expertise about your operations and industry to ensure the AI tools you use understand your business and what they’re supposed to do. “Real world intelligence comes before AI intelligence,” he says.
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Khan Meurer agrees, adding human verification is a “critical part” of successful AI deployments. She says good AI tools learn and evolve once operational but if they are built or installed incorrectly at the start, that added knowledge may not be prove useful.
On the flip side, when they work, scaling them should always be considered. “Think about cross-functional value,” she says.
