Leveraging GenAI for business: how Else helps you enhance, advance, and pioneer

Enhance:
Elevating efficiency in current operations

The first lens, Enhance, focuses on making internal work more effective. This involves an approach to integrate AI into existing workflows in order to streamline processes and improve productivity. Think of it as using AI as an Assistant, doing things for you.

At Else, we help businesses identify key workflows ripe for AI enhancement, which means splitting everyday tasks into two buckets – manual tasks and cognitive tasks. Manual tasks includes tasks that just take time to churn through, like summarising product feedback, whereas cognitive tasks are where we apply our smarts and intuition to connect ideas. More of the latter, please. The name of the game is to pass any manual labour to a suitable AI (which necessitates a view of what different AI’s are good and bad at), freeing up more time for cognitive efforts, the human bit. The bit where we excel.

Photo by: Red Zeppelin

This process follows four steps:

1. Identifying Workflows

   Pinpointing tasks and processes that can benefit from AI integration. For example, creating project plans, conducting workshops, or generating mood boards.

2. Prioritising by Suitability

   Evaluating workflows based on effort, frequency, and the importance of validation to determine which tasks AI can effectively support.

3. Breaking Down Workflows

   Deconstruct workflows into constituent steps and identifying which steps AI can perform faster or more accurately. For instance, using AI for data analysis, meeting preparation, and note-taking.

4. Piloting AI Solutions

   Experiment with AI tools in selected workflows to assess their impact. This may initially slow down tasks due to the learning curve but ultimately aims to increase efficiency and output quality.

A case in point: Else recently worked with a product team within mobile telco O2 to identify and enhance their workflows. Some team members had not used a large language model (LLM) before, and there was apprehension associated with starting to use AI. By guiding them through the process of identifying suitable workflows and implementing AI pilots, Else helped reduce this apprehension.

Advance:
Driving innovation and growth

If Enhance is about efficiencies, finding opportunities to hand over and speed up some of our more mundane and repetitive tasks, the Advance lens focuses on leveraging AI to take aspects of an existing product/service and do it better. It’s also about finding ways to innovate rapidly by responding to market opportunities and threats. Think of it as using AI as a strategic thought partner, a tool for building and expanding with you.

Here, AI is leveraged to enhance current products and services and create new ones, and this approach can be both internally and externally focused.

We believe that the emergence of AI effectively presents us with new smart materials for creating products and services. Building upon the foundations of the Enhance stage, by working with AI tools in repetitive manual tasks, teams can learn what this new material or building block offers and, subsequently their ability to exploit AI to improve the CX of their products/services, increases.

Photo by: Marek Piwnicki

Else assists organisations in

1. Enhancing Products and Services

   Using AI to improve the features and functionality of existing offerings. For example, enhancing a telco loyalty app to provide more personalised and relevant rewards.

2. Generating Ideas

   Using AI to brainstorm and develop new features, products, or services. For example, generating ideas for new services in a customer loyalty program.

3. Setting Up an AI Innovation Practice

   Establishing dedicated teams and practices to continually explore and implement AI-driven enhancements. This involves creating a structured process for regularly reviewing and integrating AI innovations into the product and service offerings.

4. Creating Strategic Roadmaps

   Developing strategic plans to introduce AI-driven innovations swiftly, ensuring organisations can exploit new opportunities ahead of competitors.

Using methods in this approach, Else partnered with GEN to advance their product development through the creation of Norton Genie. Norton Genie was developed to provide personalised scam detection features using AI-enabled technology. The successful pilot launch has now led Norton to integrate the product into it’s overall product portfolio.

Pioneer:
Leading transformative change

In the first phase, the key objective is to automate the leg work. In the second phase, we aim to exploit AI to advance or improve a product/service significantly, whereas in the third, we seek to transform, pioneer new business lines, and invent new product & service opportunities.

The Pioneer lens aims at using AI to create fundamental changes in business models and strategies, where these strategies are likely to be at higher risk but have the potential to have greater longer-term value. 

Photo by: Unsplash+ In collaboration with Galina Nelyubova

This involves:

1. Speculative Design (which some call Design Fiction)

   This approach explores and imagines possible futures, artefacts and services to provoke discussion, encouraging stakeholders to think critically about probable, possible and preferable futures alongside the implications of emerging technologies and societal trends.

2. Strategic Foresight

   Leveraging AI to sense future opportunities and threats, building long-term resilience and ensuring the organisation remains relevant.

3. Disruptive Innovations

   Implementing AI to disrupt traditional business models, fostering innovations that can redefine entire industries.

4. Building Resilience
   

   Using AI to develop strategies that not only respond to but anticipate market shifts, ensuring the organisation can navigate and thrive amidst change.