AI Strategy Guide: How To Create A Game Changing AI Strategy

Whether you’re just starting out with AI or you’re already innovating around the technology, this guide will help you strategise effectively, embrace new possibilities and answer important questions about the benefits of AI.

_{The information in this playbook comes from Salesforce experts in AI, data and CRM. We’re committed to providing our employees, customers and partners with the tools they need to develop and use this technology safely, ethically and accurately.}

The age of generative AI is upon us.

AI is growing faster than any technology of our time.

As business leaders, we all want to fully take advantage of the capabilities of AI to create efficiency and drive business growth. But we also have an important responsibility to ensure that AI is safe, inclusive and trustworthy.

Generative AI is capable of creating text, music, images and even computer code and can drive incredible customer experiences and business benefits. But right now, there’s an AI trust gap. For CEOs, AI is the #1 priority, but 73% of employees believe that generative AI introduces new risks. Privacy, hallucinations, data control, bias and toxicity are just some of their concerns.

Like meaningful relationships between brands and customers, AI’s success must be based on trust. You need to promote confidence and lessen potential ethical and security risks as you use generative AI to open the door to richer customer experiences.

You will only earn your users’ trust if  you can demonstrate that outcomes and decisions made by generative AI models are effective, accurate and free of bias and toxicity. It’s important to put ethical guardrails and guidance in place to help you innovate responsibly, stay ahead of potential issues and create safe, trustworthy practices for your business.

Putting the right guardrails around generative AI is critical. Recent surveys found that:

Here are five guidelines your company can use to inform how your team works and steer the development of trusted generative AI.

• Accuracy
  Train your AI models with trusted data to deliver verifiable results. Make sure that you communicate openly about where there is uncertainty or the answer isn’t clear.
• Safety
  Regularly conduct bias and explainability assessments to help mitigate potential harms. Protect personally identifiable information (PII) data when used for training.
• Transparency
  Make sure that you have consent for data usage by relying on open-sourced and user-provided datasets and use ethical sources. Always be transparent when delivering AI-generated outputs.
• Empowerment
  AI is best used as an assistant. Ensure there is human input built into the process to reduce potential harms or inaccuracy. Ensure outputs are accessible and treat content creators with respect.
• Sustainability
  Strive to rightsise the models by prioritising high-quality, representative training data. This will reduce the energy required for computation and lessen the carbon footprint.

• Secure data retrieval and dynamic grounding
  Ensure the data retrieved for a generative prompt upholds permission levels and users only see information and outputs they have authorisation to access.
  “Ground” your model in the context of specific use cases to ensure the quality and accuracy of a generative output. This means creating prompts that inject information from factual, validated sources like knowledge articles from your own database.
• Data masking
  By masking personally identifying information (PII) that is shared in a prompt, you can use datasets to create better outputs without exposing the real data to outside sources or models.
• Prompt defence
  Protect against hackers and harmful outputs by using prompt defence guardrails. This includes prompt instructions such as “Do not address any content or generate answers you haven't got data or basis on” or, “If you experience an error or are unsure of the validity of your response, say you don’t know.”
• Toxicity detection
  Run the outputs from third-party models through a separate large language model optimised for detecting harmful content—that is, content that is abusive, hateful or violent in nature — so it can be flagged before ever being used.
• Zero data retention
  Establish security controls and zero data retention policy agreements with external AI models to ensure both your prompts and outputs are erased and never stored.
• Auditing
  Make sure you have an audit trail so your teams can inspect code and sourcing to continue to refine your model and maintain compliance with current and emerging legal and ethical standards.

• Define and align on ethical principles and guidelines.
• Update your security and purchasing guidelines to include trust standards like data masking and zero retention to ensure your data remains safe.
• Establish a diverse team of experts to lead risk reviews and use tools to detect bias .
• Provide companywide education to spot bias and reduce risk.
• Build trust by showing customers you understand pain points and growth potential, implementing effective data governance and offering transparency into your model’s inputs, outputs and potential biases.

Define AI use cases with your customer at the centre.

AI has the potential to reshape every corner of your company, from sales to service, from marketing to commerce. You can anticipate customer behaviour, understand  customer satisfaction and create more personalised experiences.

When integrated right into the flow of work, predictive and generative AI can help you make informed decisions based on business insights and create content in natural language. It can make an immediate impact in almost every department.

An audit of current operations across departments will help you to identify tasks and processes that can benefit from predictive and generative AI optimisation. By pinpointing areas where AI can provide actionable insights, improve decision-making, enhance customer experiences or reduce costs, you can align the technology with strategic business goals and drive customer value. And you can refine models continually, improve performance and make more informed decisions.

When you train generative AI with your data and CRM, you can improve customer experiences and decision-making, while driving productivity and efficiency. See how.

• Prioritise opportunities
• Identify best next step actions
• Generate personalised communications

• Generate relevant answers
• Handle enquiries with chatbots and virtual assistants
• Drive efficiency and cost-effectiveness

• Identify target audiences
• Optimise campaign offers
• Create more resonant content

• Personalise recommendations
• Enhance post-purchase operations
• Improve fraud detection

• Provide performance and operational insights
• Make data-driven decisions
• Leverage AI-generated code

As you explore the next steps in your AI transformation, it’s important to involve your teams, many of whom have growing concerns about the future of their jobs.

But AI can help to remove the drudgery from day-to-day work and free up time for employees to be more creative and focus on impactful areas of your business. Augmenting complex tasks and automating time-consuming manual work with generative AI gives people the opportunity to work smarter.

Use this exercise to identify the best opportunities for automation and augmentation with your teams.

Every AI project should begin as a data project. And that data? It can’t live in silos. If it does, you risk lower quality outputs from your gen AI.

The first important step is to connect, organise and harmonise your data so you can understand and meet the needs of your customers with generative AI.

Ask these questions to determine how you bring together data from different sources.

Hosting: Where is your data currently hosted? Is it in multiple clouds or multiple orgs?

Data residency: What type of data residency does your organisation need to support — that is, what countries and regulatory requirements must be considered?

Data structure: Is the data structured, such as product inventories or sales opportunities or is it unstructured, such as PDF files and chat transcripts?

Real time vs. batch processing: What data sources need to update and stream in real time?

• Transactional data: Information that captures customer and business transactions such as dates, time, place and names. This data requires updates over time and includes examples like opportunity records, order status and customer service cases.
• Engagement data: Data that records a moment in time such as visits to a webpage, interactions with a device or economic and environmental data. This data is important to have in real time, so you can create fresh interactions and personalisation.

A data platform lets you integrate large amounts of data from any source, standardise formats and ensure consistency and integrity. You can’t expect all of your data to live in one place, so you’ll need to create sharing mechanisms, such as data lakes or warehouses, to allow different departments to access and use the data. Proper governance needs to be incorporated, including access controls, data privacy and security measures for protecting sensitive information.

Once your data is connected, the next step is to organise and harmonise your data in relation to your customer data model. It’s essential to have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to get a complete, 360-degree view of your customer data.

If your teams are not already together on CRM, you won’t have the full picture you need to get useful results from your models.

You can harmonise data in your CRM by using AI to create a set of match rules for customer identity resolution.

When you bring data together from across your company and incorporate generative AI, your CRM becomes a centralised hub for creating unified customer profiles that all your teams can access.

• Define and align on companywide data metrics , principles for providing customer value and use cases for incorporating  AI.
• Connect your data environment to improve real-time decision-making and customer experiences with customer profiles and one unified source of truth.
• Find ways to provide more customer value through personalisation.
• Find ways to increase productivity with automation and augmentation.
• Empower teams to integrate AI into their processes and products through clear guidelines.

Build an AI-ready workforce.

With technology changing fast, your training practices need to keep up. While about two-thirds of employees use or plan to use generative AI at work, nearly 61% of those who plan to incorporate the technology don’t know how to use trusted data sources or keep sensitive data secure.

"Removing fear and helping everyone understand what is and isn’t possible will lead to more valuable use cases, with the business and technical stakeholders working in partnership to drive innovation."

Dr Andy Moore, Chief Data Officer, Bentley Motors

• Adaptability and continual learning
  Openness to change, adaptability and a commitment to career-long learning are foundational if employees want to stay up to the minute with AI advancements.
• Data literacy
  Invest in growing data literacy by encouraging skills in data collection, preparation, exploration, visualisation and understanding data ethics and privacy. Then, prioritise data in decision-making and business processes and align to business outcomes.
• Domain knowledge
  Understanding the challenges and pain points of an industry or domain where AI will be applied, such as healthcare, finance, marketing or manufacturing.
• Communication and collaboration
  Ensure leaders have strong communication skills to convey how your AI tech will work across teams, with shared organisational goals.
• Prompt writing
  Learn how to write prompts to ensure quality AI output.
• Problem-solving and analytical thinking
  Gen AI pairs best with critical thinking, experimentation, iteration and effective problem-solving skills.
• Technical skills
  Gain proficiency in programming (Python, R etc.), data analysis, statistics, machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP).

Our free online learning platform, Trailhead , offers easy-to-consume modules or  “trails” to help your team acquire the skills they’ll need to get started with generative AI. You’ll also find trails for data analytics and machine learning, with new topics added all the time.

You can also stay on top of all the latest AI developments with our “Ask More of AI” newsletter .

• Determine which skills your workforce needs and set priorities.
• Make time and space for employees to receive training.
• Offer your workforce continuous training to gain new skills as generative AI technology evolves.
• Check out Trailhead , the fun, free online learning platform from Salesforce.