This article is based on John Dougherty’s talk at the Revenue Marketing Summit in Seattle. As an RMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. 

When you think about AI, what comes to mind? 

Given recent headlines, you might find yourself thinking of terms like "ethical concerns," "digital takeover," or “dead internet theory” – words that can sound foreboding, threatening, or even inhuman. 

After all, we’ve all read about the existential risk of AI and how the godfather of AI, Geoff Hinton, quit Google to evangelize about the risks.

But today, I want to talk about AI a bit differently – as a way to empower your team and help them do what's most important to you. I'm also going to share a 5-step process you can use to harness the power of AI. 

Now, I'm not an AI expert, but I know that if our team can do this, yours can too, provided you do one key thing.

The key is to use AI for a human-centric reason – make sure your whole team knows you're using it so they can thrive. You want your people to have the latest tools to be successful because you genuinely care about them. This technology can be transformational, as long as you approach it with your team's best interests in mind.

5 steps to empower your team with AI

We can choose to view AI as a threatening, ominous force, or we can see it as a way to help our teams become better at what they do and enjoy their jobs more. 

That's the approach my team took – our goal was to increase both our impact and our job satisfaction by 25%, and do it all within 12 months, without any additional headcount or cutbacks.

At first, that 25% target seemed highly aspirational, but we chose it deliberately, knowing that AI has the potential to automate away around 25% of the work that people typically do. 

Rather than simply reducing our headcount and still doing the same amount of work, we wanted to keep our team size intact and empower them to be 25% more effective and satisfied. Ultimately, this initiative was driven by a desire to bring more joy to our team through the use of AI. 

So how can you make that a reality for your team? It's a five-step process:

  1. Decide on the specific tasks and activities that you want AI to take over from your team. 
  2. Identify the technology and processes that need to be in place to support that change.
  3. Get your internal stakeholders aligned. 
  4. Train everyone on how to collaborate with the machine. 
  5. Start measuring your results.

Let's dive into this process in more detail…

Step one: Determine the tasks best suited to AI

To begin, you’ll need to catalog all the tasks your team currently handles. This may feel like a daunting exercise, but it's a crucial foundation. For us, this resulted in an eight-page document detailing everything our team does on a day-to-day basis. 

The next step is to carefully review this list, removing any duplicates so you end up with a concise, comprehensive overview.

Then, you'll evaluate each task against four key criteria:

  1. Value of using AI: How much better or faster could an AI system perform this task compared to a human? 
  2. Ability to apply AI: Do you have the necessary data and resources to automate this effectively?
  3. Desirability of the task: How much do your team members like (or dislike) doing this particular activity?
  4. Urgency: Is this something that needs to be addressed immediately, or can it wait?

The "desirability" factor was especially important for us. For instance, we have a graphic designer who loves creating original artwork, so that's not a task we'd want to automate, but there are tedious activities, like finding stock photos, that she dislikes – those are perfect tasks to hand off to an AI system.

By scoring each task against these four criteria, you can start to identify the highest-impact, highest-desirability use cases for AI. The tasks with the top aggregate scores are the ones you'll want to prioritize automating.

I'll admit, I thought this initial scoring process would be more difficult, but our team was actually able to work through it quite quickly and confidently. Before long, the best AI use cases became readily apparent.

Of course, this is just the first step. Once you've identified the prime opportunities, you'll need to ensure you have the right technology and processes in place. This foundation of understanding your team's activities is absolutely crucial. It sets you up for success in the phases to come.

Step two: Identify technology and process changes