Organizations often block their own path towards scaling by delaying innovations purely out of their loyalty to their core businesses. Unfortunately, fixed organizational structures and legacy operating models result in frailty, disabling the sight of potential market changes. Enterprises hesitate to build products or services with new technology as they are unsure of whether the growth rates would satisfy their shareholders.

Today, to compete in a VUCA environment, businesses and their change agents must consider relooking and reconsidering how they engage and conduct business with their customers and leverage innovative technologies to enhance or introduce products/services to the market.

With rapidly changing consumer buying patterns and preferences, enterprises are increasingly focusing on digitization to evolve their business models, they are being mindful of the efficiency of business operating units, which enables them to pinpoint areas that need additional focus or restructuring quickly. Some of the possible initiatives organizations can opt for are:

• Growth hacking: Organizations need to be agile and iterative in their approach to keep up with the changes in the industry. Having a growth mindset can enable management, embrace challenges, show resilience while working through obstacles, and bounce back from impediments sooner, leading to overall higher achievement. Organizations backed by a growth hacking mindset will be able to foster innovation and generate higher financial returns.

• Retooling organization: Companies should 'avoid putting all eggs" in one basket regarding technology infrastructure. The focus should be on adopting technology like building a Lego structure, where individual components are replaced if the scalability and validity for the current and future needs of the business aren't met.

• Adopting new-age innovation rather than reinventing: Applications of AI are evolving within the industry at a fast-paced, which enables organizations to evaluate quickly, adapt, pilot, and scale within the organizations. Reinventing AI would mean wastage of resources of time, instead, organization precious resources can be spent on identifying the right opportunity to evaluate and scale the benefits of AI.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has crushed standards and redefined how business is conducted, affecting most enterprises in some way or another. At the same time, enterprises were already leveraging data science and AI in the past few years.  A significantly greater number of organizations are now looking for ways to harness them to reinvent themselves. Key-focused areas remain in strategy building, decision-making and governance setup, business planning and budgeting, funding decision making, managing performance and company culture, risk management, and more.

For businesses, resiliency will become even more significant than efficiency as they move forward and data science will help companies maintain. For instance, retail stores and restaurants that were more dependent on brick-and-mortar sales before the pandemic had to make drastic changes to survive and sustain. While some were forced to shut shop, the rest kept steering ahead with new business models to adapt and thrive. Data science helped companies stabilize their organizations, build new processes, establish new communication channels and workflow, adapt to the remote working environment, recognize (and adapt to) changing consumer patterns and identify the emerging trends by using AI and machine learning.

Traditionally, legacy companies used to focus only on their core business. With the new wave of transformation and new opportunity post the pandemic, these prominent established players are reinventing themselves and creating businesses in new areas with a very different mindset and culture than their traditional organizations.

The new digital era demands a significant change in traditional thinking and focusing on the practical approach of collaboration, competition, and innovation that can combine data science, AI, and business acumen to conceive, build and bring new digital products to market at scale.

Author

Anees Merchant, Executive Vice President – Applied AI & Digital at Course5 Intelligence 

Anees Merchant, Executive Vice President – Applied AI & Digital at Course5 Intelligence. Anees leads the Applied AI and Digital business and brings over 23 years of experience to Course5 Intelligence Pvt. Ltd. He has worked with numerous global Fortune 500 clients across various industries, including Retail / eTail, Travel and Hospitality, Telecommunications, and Technology and Media. Last year he was recognized as 40 under 40 by a premium India publication house to honor his digital initiatives. Anees serves as an Advisor for the WIAC (Wiley Innovation Advisory Council). For two years in a row, he has co-authored the Wiley Black Book (2019 and 2020) with other esteemed industry leaders in partnership with Wiley. At Course5, Anees has led and launched industry-recognized and leading solutions and products (Compete and Discovery). His work at Course5 revolves chiefly around setting a go-to-market strategy for Applied AI, scaling global business (sales, operations, and solutions), engaging with Executives at Fortune 500 companies, and building the strategic partner ecosystem. Anees has worked with clients across industries to drive impact on their business by enabling them with innovative AI-led solutions and practices. He is currently focusing on leveraging artificial intelligence to disrupt the space of digital and insights. Anees is also certified in Lean Six Sigma with an MBA from NMIMS, Mumbai.

Anees Merchant, Executive Vice President – Applied AI & Digital at Course5 Intelligence