As the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution continues to gain momentum, it’s crucial for organisations to prepare their internal data to leverage the full potential of AI technologies. In this article we provide 10 crucial steps organisations can take to ensure that their data is AI ready.

Step 1: Educate Yourself and Your Team

Dive into Online Courses: Platforms like Coursera and Udacity offer a wealth of AI courses for all levels. Microsoft’s AI product, Copilot, is a great place to start. These courses cover topics such as machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning, providing a solid foundation for understanding AI technologies.

Get Hands-On: Explore ways to prompt AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot to understand their capabilities. This practical approach can help your team gain a deeper understanding of how AI can be integrated into your CRM and ERP systems.

Step 2: Identify AI Opportunities Within Your Organisation

Look for repetitive and rules-based tasks: This can be done through a simple process mapping technique. Cloudteam Company offers this solution through our advisory services offering and business process management workshop.

Leverage AI for data analysis and insights: Explore how AI analyses large volumes of customer and operational data to uncover valuable insights that an help drive business decisions and process optimisation.

Enhance decision-making with AI-powered predictions: Consider the potential of using AI to help make predictions and forecasts based on historical data. This enables teams to make more informed decisions.

Step 3: Break Down Data Silos

Foster collaboration between departments: Encourage inter-departmental collaboration to ensure that all relevant data is accessible for AI analysis. This may involve breaking down silos and establishing cross-functional data-sharing practices

Step 4: Think Structure, Not Just Size

Clean, well-organised data: Emphasize the importance of clean, well-organized data as the fuel for the AI engine. This includes addressing inconsistencies, missing values, and duplicates to ensure the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated insights.

Step 5: Optimise Your Data for AI

Tidy up your data by investing in data: Cleaning processes to address inconsistencies, missing values, and duplicates. We cover this in another blog post which includes how to use Company.info on Salesforce to ensure that your data is always up to date and clean.

Step 9: Data Integration and Transformation

Consolidate Information from Various Systems: Use reporting solutions designed to consolidate information from various systems into a central hub, making it easier to access and analyse data for AI applications.

Automate Data Transformations: Automate data transformations to meet the specific format and hierarchy requirements of AI models, ensuring that your data is optimised for AI analysis.

Step 10: Embrace Human and AI Collaboration

Advocate for Human and AI Collaboration: Promote the use of AI to augment human expertise and decision-making, emphasising that successful business outcomes depend on a combination of human intelligence and AI-generated insights.

As organisations prepare for the AI revolution, taking these steps to prep internal data will be crucial in unlocking the transformative potential of AI technologies and driving significant improvements in business operations and decision-making.