Yesterday’s Workday Elevate conference in Sydney was excellent. I particularly enjoyed hearing The Right Honourable Dame Jacinda Ardern speak.
Across the day, there were two major take-outs for me when thinking about managing complex transformations and tech implementations:
- Double down on non-technology elements. With the benefit of hindsight, many reflected the biggest success factors were people focused: strong project leadership, clear cadences, early user involvement, and disciplined governance.
- AI is shifting from the ‘promise’ of AI to the management of AI. The focus is rapidly becoming governance, control, security and practical application across the organisation. This is true from simple to complex AI set-ups.
Overall, one thing became increasingly clear.
The complexity of transformation is no longer primarily technical. It’s coordinating and orchestrating the complexity.
Seeing the evolution of Workday’s platform, along with several others I know well, reinforced a new way to think about AI strategy.
Start with your SaaS providers.
Many are doing the heavy lifting to embed AI into their platform based on deep market knowledge of what creates practical value and what is realistically achievable. In many cases, they are also absorbing a significant portion of the governance and implementation risk that often stalls AI initiatives internally.
That creates a different opportunity for organisations.
Rather than beginning with daunting native AI ambitions, the immediate opportunity may be to streamline workflows around the AI capabilities already emerging within existing platforms, create measurable improvements and learn from the adoption experience itself.
That learning can then shape broader AI strategy over time.
I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks about how clear priorities and alignment can help organisations create an AI pathway they feel confident executing.
This writing is inspired by my earlier article The Second Feedback Lens
