When considering the implementation of artificial intelligence into a business, many leaders assume such a move will require a large-scale transformation – a massive investment of time, money, and resources and a sea change in how the company operates.
But that is not an absolute truth – nor is it necessarily considered best practice. In fact, there are significant benefits to starting small and building from there. Think of it like the flywheel effect, which occurs when small wins accumulate over time, creating momentum that keeps a business growing. The same phenomenon occurs in the world of AI, where small, consistent, AI-driven improvements compound into major productivity gains over the long-term.
How can you create an AI productivity flywheel in your business? Let’s start with the basics.
What is an AI Productivity Flywheel?
A productivity flywheel starts with effort, builds momentum, and leads to compounding results. If we were looking at the world of HR, a productivity flywheel might start by researching employee engagement strategies and then building a robust employee engagement plan. As your programs and policies start to take effect, it builds momentum, and you start to see changes across your organization. Suddenly, absenteeism decreases and productivity increases. Over time, the results pay off exponentially as your attrition rates go down and your employees help recruit new members of your team.
The same can occur in AI implementation: First, you start small, incorporating a few strategic AI tools into your operations. Those tools increase efficiency and productivity, empowering the members of your team to focus on more creative and fulfilling tasks. Incremental wins build trust, reduce resistance to AI adoption, and lead to even greater productivity across the organization, which inspires more far-reaching AI adoption. The cycle then repeats, with increasingly impactful results.
How to Start Your AI Productivity Flywheel
Identify high-friction, low-risk processes with managers, and research the tools to address them.
Consider both high-level and granular use cases. Sometimes an AI tool will benefit every employee at the company; sometimes you should source one that is specific to a department or even role. For instance, Visily.ai allows you to create hi-fidelity wireframes and prototypes in minutes and could help accelerate innovation within your organization exponentially.
- Actionable tip: Track and measure time saved or errors reduced to demonstrate the value of your AI investment.
How to Build Momentum for AI Adoption in Your Business
First, track and celebrate your wins. Use metrics to show progress and share success stories across teams. This will increase acceptance and enthusiasm for AI and open more doors to implementation and adoption. Then, broaden your AI use cases. Apply AI to department-wide tasks, such as HR screening or customer support. You can also combine applications, integrating tools like Zapier with OpenAI APIs to streamline workflows.
- Actionable tip: Be strategic in choosing the right tools for your organizational needs and goals. This will allow you to see meaningful results, and the momentum around AI will begin to build.
How to Accelerate the Flywheel
You capitalize on the results. For instance, if your AI tools serve to increase efficiency, how can your team reinvest the time saved into higher value tasks and strategic decision making? If your tools help you save costs, how can you reinvest those savings to create more value for your business?
- Actionable tip: Use AI tools to elevate some of this work. You can use Notion AI or ChatGPT for brainstorming, for example, or Power BI to analyze trends. You could also explore using sentiment analysis tools to understand team morale or to process customer insights.
How to Create a Self-Sustaining AI Productivity Flywheel
Once the flywheel is set in motion, the goal is to sustain it over the long-term. One way to do this is to use a feedback loop: Each time you invest in a new AI tool, establish KPIs to gauge its impact, analyze the results, and use them to learn more about what’s working and what’s not. Then, you can take concrete steps to evolve and improve. Keep this loop running on repeat, and the flywheel will keep moving.
- Actionable tip: Empower your team to identify new opportunities for AI tools to support your work, and encourage experimentation. This could take the shape of internal challenges or hackathons. Or it could be as simple as routinely checking in with the members of your team to source new ideas or opportunities.
Pro Tips for AI Implementation
First, think outside the box. While AI tools can be very useful on their own, there is the potential for even greater impact if you combine AI tools to create modular solutions. For instance, let’s go back to one of the tools we referenced earlier, Visily.ai. The tool itself is powerful, and you could consider using ChatGPT to refine the prompt that you feed into it to streamline the process and increase productivity. This layering of tools is essentially what is happening with agentic AI, the next evolution of artificial intelligence (more on that here), and you can harness the potential of this evolution in your own organization.
Our second pro tip is to maintain a focus on ethics in your AI implementation and usage. Ensure your tools are compliant with your company’s policies and with your data privacy standards, and vet your AI vendors for transparency and mitigate risks by balancing AI with human decision-making.
Creating an AI productivity flywheel can transform your business, but it takes time. So start small: Choose one process to optimize, identify an AI tool that meets your organizational standards, and watch the momentum grow. Eventually, you can create a self-sustaining flywheel that keeps your organization evolving and innovating, and your business will benefit as a result.
Don’t fall behind your competitors. Our AI experts can help you leverage AI to build your own AI productivity flywheel.
