Welcome to Part 6 of our comprehensive 6-part series, Beyond Buzzwords: Finding your Purpose for AI, written together with data science expert Noelle Saldana.

Integrating an AI practice successfully into your organisation is a journey and an investment. The integration is prone to failure as organisations do not hire realistic minimum viable teams and do not often set this new organisation up for success. Instead, they often simply install one person, often in a vacuum, and hope for the magic to happen. Don’t let this be you!

Usually, the focus is on producing results. The inconvenient truth is that AI is a complex problem-solving, creative, collaborative endeavour, and results aren’t linear.

Problem-solving is not a linear, predictable process. Instead, the design process offers a proven approach to navigating uncertainty and exploring possibilities productively. This illustration was inspired by Damien Newman’s *design squiggle*.

As you move forward with making AI an integral part of your organisation, it’s critical to consider both who will be involved (the team and culture) and how they will operate (the strategy). Let’s look at each in more detail.

Team: What size team do you need?

To determine a realistic team size, you need to consider the different capabilities and expertise necessary for your AI team and the surface area and complexity of the scope.

Ask yourself, truthfully, what’s the readiness of your organisation? What do you need to invest in to be able to leverage a high-performing AI team? Realistically, how much time and effort will that take?

You’ll need a technical leader who can prioritise the AI work to be able to make progress, and can evaluate what they need to say no to instead.

This leader needs to be empowered to set up this team for success:

What does a lean, dedicated, collaborative, yet critical mass team look like? What skills do you need?
How does this team need to work to deliver best practice value? How does that best integrate with other teams and ways of working?
What current behaviours and habits hinder the success of this team? What needs to change culturally across the organisation?

Strategy: How this new team operates

The AI team will work at odds with other teams’ priorities if they are not properly integrated into the organisation’s strategy, prioritisations, and decision-making. It is key to have a collaborative way of working cross-functionally in general, but also very specifically for AI to have the desired impact.

Consider: How do you need to adapt your ways of working, decision-making, and measuring and rewarding progress now that you are invested in AI? This is not as simple as adding your new AI person to all the meetings, but fully integrating new and existing work streams together. This is a lot of strategic work that will look different for every company.

What does it mean to be an integrated AI org? We’ll wrap up this series with a final checklist that will help you address the hard questions and get the most out of your AI investment.

Are all goals aligned to strategic priorities and all teams incentivised to succeed by working together?
How are you updating strategic priorities to integrate this new AI work?
How does the AI practice represent itself and influence strategy and execution in the organisation?
How do funding, prioritisation, and decision-making enable the AI practice?

By the way, if this topic and way of framing is new, you might also want to read more about transforming your operating model.

What’s next?

Anytime you’re exploring new possibilities, it’s critical to keep in mind that success isn’t about predictable and immediate results. it’s not about setting a new team up in a silo to come up with a magical solution on their own—your goal is to integrate and support any new function.

If all this sounds like hard work, that’s because it is! But remember, the alternative is investing time and resources in projects or teams that have minimal chances of success and creating the value they could contribute to your business.

We have put together a handy checklist for you to summarise how you purposefully add AI to your product and organisation. You can download it here.

Finally, we’d like to remind you that you don’t have to do it alone. We help support teams and individuals on their transformation journeys, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we might work together .

This the final part in the series. Read on:

Part 1: Beyond Buzzwords: Finding your Purpose for AI

Part 2: AI Hype is New, Our Reaction To It Is Not

Part 3: Is the product you’re building a good candidate for AI?

Part 4: You are inspired to use AI: Now what?

Part 5: Your AI investment = (AI needs) + (the necessary team)

Part 6: Strategies for successfully integrating an AI practice into your org