I was recently invited to speak on ‘The Consulting Growth’ podcast, hosted by Prof. Joe O’Mahoney, about the impact of AI on professional services firm and consulting in particular.

A lot of the discussion in the media is captured by large organizations, and their views on the potential of AI and how they are planning to adopt it. This can give the perception that AI is now at the stage of widespread adoption.

However, the lifeblood of most economies are small and medium-sized enterprises. And they are still trying to make sense of what it means for them. Where can they use it? What are the proofs of concept? How can they scale? How can they take their people along in that transformation?

In early July, I chaired a conference on the impact of generative AI on knowledge management and insights professionals, and the key theme that came up there was that there is a huge expectations gap. Senior executives know that they are expected to be doing something on AI and therefore they just look for speed and easy wins.

But really what they should be doing is thinking “what are my problems, what are my pain points, and where would AI be a good fit for that problem?” Rather than we must just use AI because that's the hot topic of the moment.

Research by the RAND corporation reports that up to 80% of generative AI projects fail. The risk is that this can lead you to underestimate the potential of AI and become disillusioned with it.

Where, in fact, there is a lot of potential, you just didn't apply it to the right you know context for your organization, the right use case for your organization.

This highlights the need to make sure that you focus it on solving problems.

For all of us, it’s hard to reimagine the future of our industry or sector and how AI will change that.

That's where foresight, strategic foresight tools can help, because they try and get um, you know individuals, teams, organizations to not only be thinking about how do I innovate for today, but how do I innovate or create business products for five years or ten years?

The mindset that you need is very different and it requires significant effort to to break out of what's happening today, of today's bubble, and really think more creatively about what's coming.

Three years ago how many expected that the main topic of conversation today would be synthetic and causal AI and how it's transforming professional services? We can underestimate what is coming and it's hard to participate in those things.

This is where strategic foresight can help organizations.

Listen to the podcast to learn more or contact me to discuss further.