Where Can You Start Developing the Operating Model of the Future? Part 8

AI Landscapes: Redefining Commerce, Careers, and Communities - Article 8 of 8

This article will continue the conversation on how to adapt to the change that AI can enable. We’ve discussed how all disruptions bring winners that use technology to change the currently accepted model to bring something different dramatically. It’s an easy concept to see in the past, but how do you drive that change now?

Our last article walked through the way to assess your customers into four kinds based on a fully loaded, net margin view. We reviewed:

• Value Drivers – the customers that create most of your net margin.
• Value Contributors – the customers that add a little more net margin.
• Complexity Drivers – the customers that make up a significant base of your customers, but don’t contribute to net margin.
• Value Destroyers – the customers that erode your net margin.

We assert that the Value Destroyers are your key to developing a new, AI-enabled operating model.

Customers that you lose margin serving are the perfect playground where you can revisit existing assumptions about how you do business and invent new, AI-powered ways of serving your customers. There’s little risk as if your experiment fails horribly, your margin position improves if they become discouraged and leave. And if your efforts are successful, the margin will improve because you have already acquired the customer!

Let’s take an example of two customers – one that leverages self-service support and one that requires additional human support. These preferences can often be the difference between a customer that supports your bottom line and one that erodes it.

This would be a perfect use case for AI agents that provide voice responses to customers. This technology is already used by companies like ylopo in the real estate market. As with most AI functionality, it’s not coming – it’s here.

By developing services to reduce costs for your most troublesome segment, you’re investing in capabilities that could be exploited further up the value chain once the solution has been proven. You can also expand sales to capture more customers you’re perhaps avoiding now. Either – or both – are great strategies that might help you hit upon the new technology-powered mix that can drive growth.

Something we feel strongly about evangelizing is that leveraging technology for cost reduction is a losing battle. It’s not a sustainable competitive advantage. The real victors of the AI age will be those companies that upgrade their human capital or forge new business models. Change is never comfortable. Technology is never “done.” The future is human. We’re rooting for you to lead through it and be more successful.

This series explored four steps we believe you should be taking – now.

Diagnose and Futurecast: AI isn’t coming. It’s here. Involve your staff – especially those in roles with a lot of human capital – in assessing use cases to boost their knowledge of what is possible and demystify the nature of the change. We now know enough to futurecast roles and understand what they will look like in an AI-enabled world. We can be precisely wrong but directionally accurate about the next five years to develop a plan for how our workforce will change.

Reskilling Human Capital: This country has never experienced a technological shift against a declining labor force. Add to this that AI-experienced resources you might want to acquire will be limited and in very high demand. Just like back in Y2K, hiring your way out of this change will be hard. We must embrace a skills-based understanding of future roles and alternative paths for impacted people.

Content, Education, and Change Management: Change management was huge in the 1990s, and it’s time this discipline came back into fashion. We’ll discuss why acting to control the narrative is crucial and share some ways to do this effectively.

Reimagined Operating Models: All past disruption winners could reimagine a product or service leveraging technology to change the dominant operating model of the day. Uber & Lyft with taxis and Netflix with video streaming are great examples of changed operating models equating to success. We’ll explore how this can be done in a way that reduces risk and can provide speedy returns.

Over this series of eight articles, we’ll touch on all these paths of success to prepare you, your business, and AI's evolving impact on the workforce. Thanks for reading. Let’s talk AI implementation. Send me a note at wade@batonglobal.com.

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About Wade Britt‍

Wade Hampton Britt, IV is a partner and the Managing Director at Bâton Global. He has lived and worked in a dozen countries in the global express and edtech sectors before joining Bâton Global in 2016. Wade is passionate about helping clients and their communities navigate the AI disruption better than previous technological changes.