There's little doubt that enterprises are undergoing an AI transformation. The questions are around how fast the transformation is happening and what form it will ultimately take.
Many views on AI in the enterprise were voiced at the IT Expo conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., from Feb. 10-12. While some enterprises are going full-bore into the AI transformation, others are taking a more cautious and measured approach.
Driving out AI resistors
AI is a "gift" that is fundamentally changing the nature of work, said Eric Vaughn, CEO of software vendor IgniteTech at a conference session.
To take full advantage of the "gift," Vaughn committed IgniteTech fully to AI in 2023. It required all employees to become proficient in AI technology and launched an "AI Mondays" initiative focused solely on AI development and learning projects.
"We have completely transformed our company to be what we now refer to as an 'AI DNA' company," he said. "Meaning 100% of the people in our company are bringing that work focus to what we're doing. We're creating brand new AI products from scratch."
However, despite the enthusiasm from the top, Vaughn found not everyone was on board with the AI transformation.
"There were lots of people who were resistant, folded their arms and said, 'I'm not going to do this,'" he said.
This led IngniteTech to take an AI-or-the-highway approach, where employees who weren't fully committed were replaced by those who were, Vaughn said. This resulted in a staggering 80% of the company being replaced at the end of the first year of the AI commitment.
Vaughn confirmed that the 80% were not replaced with AI in any form, but with people who have the same AI mindset.
"[The 80%] is not a percentage I'm proud of or happy about, but I don't think that anyone should be trying to run a team when you have people who are doing everything from failing to participate to subverting the mission because they don't believe it," he said.
It was also a surprise that the greatest resistance to AI came from technical professionals, such as software developers, who view AI as a threat to their specific skills, Vaughn said.
"The marketing, sales and finance people were less resistant because they were given tools," he said. "They can now do things that they couldn't do before."
In the period after IgniteTech moved to completely focus on AI, the company's profitability has increased, and it developed three AI-based productivity products, Vaughn said.
A cautious AI approach
While IgniteTech has fully embraced the AI transformation, others see it in more practical terms and say it should be adopted carefully.
AI is a tool that shouldn't be talked about in "magical, mystical terms," said Greg Taffet, CIO at Ceres Environmental Services at an IT Expo session.
The AI tools are there to help solve business problems, he said.
"It's not about choosing AI as the solution, [it's about] choosing a solution that in many cases includes AI," Taffet said.
AI has been around for 50 years, and we are just at another step in AI's evolutionary path.
"The ERP, email and CRM systems that we use all have AI, so it's all over the place," he said.
It's not about choosing AI as the solution, [it's about] choosing a solution that in many cases includes AI.
Greg TaffetChief information officer, Ceres Environmental Services
The AI transformation is a complex process that requires extensive change management before a project begins, Taffet said. Organizations must tell employees what to expect, what to prepare for and provide proper training during the process.
It's also not practical for many enterprises to consider firing employees who are resistant to AI, he said. It might work in smaller firms or ones that do more theoretical work, but AI adoption is more complicated for firms that produce hard goods and rely on workers with specialized skills and experience.
"They may be the expert in how to run the laser that does this important step in the process," Taffet said. "You can't just fire them, because they run the laser better than any other people in your company."
Early stages of the AI transformation
The evolution of AI tools is a key factor in their successful adoption, said Andrew Parry, CIO at The ODP Corp., the parent company of Office Depot, during an IT Expo session.
In 2023, ODP provided AI development tools to its technical teams, but adoption was low due to numerous quality issues, hallucinations, and incorrect results, Parry said.
The tools have evolved, and ODP was an early adopter of the Cursor AI development tool, he said. Results improved greatly in part because ODP brought in Cursor people and included them in the change management process.
"We converted people that were completely negative advocates for AI and they were the guys that we put in front of the whole group," Parry said.
Change management is one of the biggest challenges for successful AI adoption, said David Less, interim CIO at DAL Consulting, during an IT Expo session. The most important factor is not necessarily to let go people who are resistant to change, but to bring employees into the process and find out what their objections and fears are.
"Maybe they don't understand it, and nobody's taken the time to tell them to bring them along," he said. "A lot of people are moved around in an organization and given a role nobody's prepared them for, and they do the best they can."
Steve Johnson, chief operating officer at Ferox Consulting, an IT consulting firm and MSP in Grand Rapids, Mich., said the company is carefully introducing AI to help improve internal and external processes.
Ferox business users have recently started to use AI tools to develop customer-facing applications that were previously handled by technical developers, Johnson said. This has reduced the shrunk the development time from months to days.
"We feel like we've only scratched the surface," he said. "Now we have people who aren't developers who have ideas, and they can turn that idea into code in 24 hours."
Regardless of the approach that an enterprise takes, there's no doubt that the AI transformation is a sea change, according to Mark Beccue, principal analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"All of us have found with the use of AI, our jobs are changing -- and that's not a bad thing," Beccue said.
There are certain jobs that AI does well and some that AI will never do well -- like those that have to do with emotional intelligence, he said. But rote jobs -- like those that crunch a lot of data -- will inevitably change and move to AI because it does that better than humans.
"We'll see a shift to people that are AI savvy -- we're all going to have to be," Beccue said. "There's a certain inevitability about the transformation of all companies."
Jim O'Donnell is a news director for TechTarget, where he covers IT strategy and enterprise ESG.
