Change, innovation and technology can be intimidating.

Technology has already changed so much of the world around us, and with the massive advances in AI, Big Data, Cloud, Connectivity, 5G, IoT and many others, bigger changes are yet to come.

However, as we discussed before, there is a huge number of businesses that still haven’t stepped into the Internet era, let alone the AI revolution. Why is this?

It’s simple – doing something new requires us to embrace change, and change, as we all know can be a bit scary. Technology change can be even more scary, especially when applied to a business that needs to continue to deliver bottom-line-growth. If that business has been achieving good-enough growth from an existing way of doing things, then the challenge of change becomes too risky to bet on.

Challenge the perceived investment and risk

Many companies we’ve spoken to have stated that they perceive the investment required into new technologies to be substantial and prohibitive. Given that, many defer the investment because they’ve got a business to run and resolve to plan to do it tomorrow.

Other companies look for specific technologies to solve all their woes. As one company said to us, “we want to improve sales using AI”.

Before heading down the AI path we decided to reframe the question to get more clarity.

We looked at:
– The existing processes, and choke-points in those

– Which choke-points could have the biggest impact if solved

– Could technology be used to solve those?

– Is AI the right technology for that problem?

By reframing the question we discovered several areas that could be tweaked, and honed in on a couple that occurred frequently and could be automated to some degree. These were ideal to apply AI to.

This is exactly how we like to work; more dolphin, less whale.

So yes, keep the big picture in mind, but look for smaller projects that can deliver results that punch above their weight. And in the example of AI – you don’t have to solve all your problems in one go, in fact this article shows how by applying AI to a small piece of a bigger picture you can have dramatic effects.

How can you overcome technology intimidation?

Such is our belief in focusing on using technology to solve smaller, less intimidating problems, we’ve recently partnered with Events Squared. They are running a series of events that are designed to help companies keep up with the pace of innovation and change.

At the time of writing there are two upcoming events, one focusing on Change and Innovation, the other looking at practical use-cases of augmented reality in the workplace. I throughly recommend that you check out these exciting events. You can register yourself for them using their EventBrite page here.