Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a recent conversation I had with Charlene Li about her new book, Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (co-authored with Dr Katia Walsh). We talk about why 90 Days, why you don’t need a separate AI strategy, why most AI initiatives fail and fail to improve customer outcomes, the use case trap, the shift that leaders need to make from “knowing” to continuous learning and the five traits of an AI-ready culture.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Harnessing AI to orchestrate customer experiences at scale – Interviews with Luc Dammann, Nina Caruso & Vivek Pandya of Adobe – and is number 585 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Charlene:
- Integrate AI into Business Strategy: Do not create a standalone AI strategy; the use of AI must be in service of the existing business strategy, helping to achieve opportunities, address problems, and create new market abilities. Value creation must always begin with a focus on the customer.
- Prioritize Customer Centricity: Highly disruptive organizations succeed by establishing a clear view and hypothesis of who their future customer will be and then figuring out what they need to do today to serve that future customer.
- Commit, Don’t Pilot: Leadership must abandon the pilot approach, as 95% of AI initiatives fail due to a lack of enterprise commitment. AI efforts should be declared as core and strategically important for the business strategy to succeed, making their success an imperative.
- Target AI Fluency: Leaders must develop “AI fluency,” which goes beyond basic literacy. Fluency is defined as understanding what AI can and cannot do, using it responsibly and ethically, and knowing how to apply it to one’s job to support the overall business strategy.
- Adopt a 90-Day Quick Start: Use a definable 90-day period for developing a strategy, roadmap, and detailed planning to ensure a quick start and avoid analysis paralysis in AI adoption.
- Shift to a Learning Strategy: Because AI is constantly changing, the focus should be on a learning strategy rather than a doing strategy. Speed is “the new moat,” so leaders must experiment in real-time and in public to learn and lead.
- Avoid the Use Case Trap: A long spreadsheet of use cases is not a strategy; instead, leaders must prioritize and place bets on specific AI applications that achieve the business strategy better, faster, cheaper, and safer. Readiness assessments are often obsolete upon completion and should be discarded.
- Embrace the Service Dividend Model: View AI-driven efficiencies not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a way to create bandwidth and increase productivity. This freed-up resource (the “service dividend”) should be consciously used to add greater value and improve customer experience, as demonstrated by the case study.
- Cultivate an AI-Ready Culture: Focus on establishing the five foundational cultural traits: Speed (trusting decisions quickly), Focus (avoiding distraction), Customer Centricity, Lifelong Learning (commitment to experimenting), and Continuous Reinvention (challenging assumptions and iterating).
- Lead with Curiosity and Questions: The domain expertise of a leader is being challenged by AI; therefore, the new required leadership skill is guiding the team by asking “really tough questions” and embracing the discomfort of not having all the answers.
- Charlene’s best advice: Get your workforce AI fluent.
- Charlene’s Punk CX brand: Claude from Anthropic.
About Charlene
Charlene Li has been helping people see the future for the past three decades. She’s an expert on digital transformation, disruption leadership and strategy, customer experience, and the future of work. She’s the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, “Open Leadership,” and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, “Groundswell”.
Charlene is also an entrepreneur, the Founder and CEO of Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm acquired in 2015. She most recently served as the Chief Research Officer for PA Consulting and currently leads her firm, Quantum Networks Group.
Charlene has worked with hundreds of top companies ranging from Adobe to Southwest Airlines and advised 49 Fortune 100 companies. She has spoken at events like the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest.
Named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and a LinkedIn Top Voice on Culture, Charlene graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in San Francisco and teaches her cat tricks in her spare time.
Check out Charlene’s new book: Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (co-authored with Dr Katia Walsh), her website www.charleneli.com, say Hi to her on Instagram @charleneli and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.
Image credit: Photo by Alan Aprilio on Unsplash