AI is a powerful tool for B2B go-to-market (GTM) teams, enabling them to analyze market and customer trends, personalize customer interactions, optimize sales strategies with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy, and more. With all the relentless buzz around AI, it’s easy to start with the tool and then go searching for a way to use it. The problem with that is you’re letting the technology, not your customers and your goals, drive your strategy. Set your company up for AI success by:
- Starting with clear goals and objectives. For technology to be valuable (i.e., have a measurable impact on the business), it must be acquired for a purpose. Purchasing and implementing AI isn’t a true measure of success. Be sure that you know why you’re onboarding AI. Be clear about what you’re looking for it to enable and what outcome you expect to receive. Any tool purchased without this direction can lead you away from ensuring that your resources and investments are providing value to your customers and your organization.
- Preparing your data. There’s a reason why sentiments such as “garbage in, garbage out” are a key part of AI conversations. AI is an amplifier. If you put good data into AI with the right direction, it will bring quality results. If you put bad data into AI, it will produce inaccurate insights and flawed outcomes. Investing time and effort into preparing your data for AI is crucial to ensure the accuracy and reliability of its outputs. To mitigate unnecessary risk for your company, also ensure that compliance is a part of the consideration.
- Educating your teams and leadership. It’s important to not just train your models but to train the resources that will be using the tools as well as your leaders. Technology is only valuable if it’s being used well. A successful AI deployment focuses on educating users so that they’re clear on what it is, how it impacts their work, how they can use it to do their jobs better, and what its limitations are. Being sure that your leadership is well informed on AI is important for driving the technical strategy; fostering AI adoption; helping manage risk; making better use of the insights to make informed decisions; and creating an AI-positive culture of innovation, continuous learning, and openness to change.
- Experimenting with pilots. We’ve all had experiences rolling out tech and then it doesn’t quite behave the way we thought it would. This can be very disruptive with large rollouts. It’s best practice for onboarding any technology (especially AI) to start with experiments and pilots, measure results, discover what works and what doesn’t, and optimize the tool and process before rolling it out broadly.
- Setting clear governance and guidelines. AI can introduce scenarios that require updates to corporate governance and policies. Work with your IT, data, and legal teams to ensure that governance policies are updated to account for these new scenarios and that the guidance is communicated and understood. Focus on areas such as AI ethics (making AI free from bias and aligning it with your company values), appropriate data access, and internal and external transparency regarding your AI usage.
B2B GTM teams have a lot to consider before successfully selecting and onboarding AI, so let’s continue the conversation. Contact your Forrester account manager to set up a guidance session with me, and join me at B2B Summit North America, March 31 to April 3 in Phoenix, where I’ll be talking about how you can build trust with AI — for your company and your customers.
