By Elizabeth Tobey, Head of Marketing, AI & Digital, NICE
2024 has begun with a bang – and it might already feel like you’re playing catch-up with new technology, trends, and business demands for the year ahead. Generative AI—and the promise of AI for business at large – is top of mind across every department and position at almost any organization globally.
So, how do you make the right AI choice for your company, your team, and your goals for 2024?
Let’s break down that challenge, which might still feel too amorphous and ambitious to actually kick off.
Understand your business objectives and needs.
Don’t dive headfirst into vetting AI technology. Start first by looking inward. Success hinges on aligning the right AI solutions with your specific goals and needs within your business. Outline your objectives, call out your pain points, and possible areas for improvement. Make a bullet point list with as concise a statement for each area as possible. Make it a sentence—or less—for every topic area. Bring this to any meeting you have with an AI partner, and use this list as a guide to understand whether any AI solution or offering can directly address your pains and needs and how AI will help meet your business objectives.
It’s important to understand that even the most sophisticated, polished, flashy technology can and will fail if it doesn’t address your needs. Find an AI partner who can understand and integrate your unique requirements into any implementation for your organization. In the business of AI, the thing to remember here is that generic is not enough: it has to be able to be tuned and trained to your business needs and goals.
Understand your evaluation criteria before you take a first meeting.
While the specific checkpoints and criteria you’ll bring to the table should vary from the points made below, this is a general guideline that can help you understand whether you are covering all the main areas that are crucial to picking the right AI partner for your needs.
- Understand your AI partner’s expertise with generative AI and conversational AI. This includes the technologies behind their solutions, APIs, and partnerships, and specific case studies highlighting how their solutions have helped previous companies.
- Vet your AI partner’s track record with deploying solutions for similar industries or use cases to your own and how adaptable and scalable the solutions were for these use cases.
- Get clear answers about data privacy and regulations. Find out how the AI will work with your existing systems, what it needs to access, where that information goes, and what security is in place.
- Know the level of support and training you will receive—at all levels—for using and maintaining your AI solution.
AI is not a one-and-done project. It is an ongoing exercise that will grow, evolve, and adapt over time—and understanding any AI partner’s commitment to being an integral part of that journey with you is crucial. You want to select a company that understands that AI is constantly changing and has a plan for innovation and a long-term vision for their AI in the future.
Build trust and relationships inside and out of your organization.
Trust is paramount for a strong and lasting relationship with any vendor, but it’s particularly important when it comes to AI for all of the reasons stated above. Understanding the technology requirements and goals must be a shared responsibility. Transparency and open communication are required for any relationship to work. Shared values between the organizations and the stakeholders of the project are crucial for a successful collaboration. You are not buying a piece of software. You are not buying a single tool. You are buying a powerful piece of technology that can and should integrate into many systems and workflows of your business. Technology that will evolve and change as your business goals and employee needs shift. You need a partner who is there with you every step of the way with joint success metrics.
Internally, you may have a variety of different hurdles to overcome. Is there still skepticism around the power and function of AI? Is there concern over data privacy, regulations, and security? Or, has your organization embraced AI, but different stakeholders are working in a siloed fashion or vetting multiple solutions when a single one could work across your entire organization? The right AI partner can help with these internal struggles by acting as a consultant rather than just a vendor. By offering guidance, proactive suggestions, ongoing support, and identifying and unifying the different stakeholders across your organization, your AI partner can help you create a powerful AI infrastructure that increases revenue and streamlines cost and technological overhead.
It’s time to make the right choice.
There’s still homework for you to do: your specific business needs are unique to you and you alone. With the building blocks provided here, you can meet any AI vendor and be confident that you can select the right solution for your needs and objectives in 2024. The first step to making the right choice is to become the well-informed CX leader who will champion AI for your business and find the right partner who meets your immediate needs and aligns with your long-term business strategies.
You’ve got this.
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About NICE
With NICE (Nasdaq: NICE), it’s never been easier for organizations of all sizes around the globe to create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. Featuring the world’s #1 cloud native customer experience platform, CXone, NICE is a worldwide leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center—and beyond. Over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, partner with NICE to transform—and elevate—every customer interaction. To learn more, nice.com/cx-ai-now.
