Becoming an AI Operator of Excellence

The launch of ChatGPT catapulted AI from an unknown science project to ubiquitous and indispensable in just a matter of a year. With Microsoft embedding Copilot into Windows and Google launching Gemini, everyone in your workforce has access to Gen AI. 

Your teams are quickly learning how they can improve their day-to-day work—and the business—with AI. Freemium consumer apps such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Scribe, Gemini, or DALL-E 3 have given your users a taste of AI. They’re quickly learning how they can automate mundane tasks, check their code for bugs, and create compelling presentations. With instant gratification comes the desire for more AI, and your teams are now using more and more freemium and commercial AI apps. 

Your organization is already drastically improving business operations and outcomes by integrating AI into your own applications. Here are some of the myriad of benefits enterprises – and your organization – are gaining from integrating and using AI:

• Informed Decision-Making: analyzing vast amounts of data to provide insights that guide strategic choices, optimize processes, and enhance overall efficiency.
• Operational Efficiency: automating routine processes, freeing up human resources for more complex and creative work.
• Customer Experience Enhancement: analyzing customer preferences, behavior, and feedback to create personalized recommendations, targeted marketing campaigns, and efficient customer service.
• Risk Management and Fraud Detection: scrutinizing transaction patterns and promptly flagging suspicious activities.
• Supply Chain Optimization: forecasting demand, optimizing inventory levels, and identifying potential disruptions.
• Data-Driven Governance: monitoring adherence to regulations, identifying risks, and ensuring ethical and legal practices. 

What About AI’s Risks?

The benefits of AI are so great that enterprises that don’t embrace AI in all aspects of their business will fall behind their competitors. The journey toward embracing AI throughout your enterprise isn’t without challenges, however. 

AI analyzes, manipulates and creates complex structured and unstructured data in a multitude of formats, including text, images, videos, and sound, and these systems don’t have a concept of privileged access or authorization. Thus, AI introduces a plethora of risks including: 

• Using unlicensed training data
• Incorporating unlicensed or protected data into the output
• Leaking your sensitive data into other organizations’ generated content
• Incorporating other organizations’ sensitive data into your generated content
• Generating incorrect outputs, known as hallucinations
• Generating biased output
• Users manipulating your AI for nefarious purposes, known as prompt injection

While your SaaS apps have a risk of data exfiltration, your AI apps have both a risk of data exfiltration and AI content proliferation, drastically increasing your attack surface.

How Can You Gain the Benefits of AI While Mitigating the Risks?

Today, most organizations are taking a binary approach to controlling the use of AI: block all instances of AI, both external apps and the use of AI in your internal apps, or allow all AI.

This all or nothing approach is very limiting. Either you forgo all the benefits of AI to remove the risks, or you accept that you will have many AI-related incidents – data leaks, data compromise, misuse, etc. – to accelerate your business with AI.

If your organization is risk averse, and is blocking all AI, whether out of fear of the unknown or fear of the uncontrollable, your organization is an Immature AI Adopter.

Conversely, if your organization is an AI Innovator, you allow all AI but have put in place minimal controls over AI use. This enables you to experience the benefits of AI. However, whether you realize it or not, you are exposed to significant risks.

There is an alternative to this binary control over AI use: deploying the full spectrum of fine-grained controls. These controls enable you to:

• Gain visibility into every use of AI throughout the organization.
• Create policies to govern AI usage.
• Balance security with useability and performance.
• Monitor AI usage and performance.
• Identify risky behavior.
• Detect and differentiate between normal and anomalous use.
• Alert and respond to AI risks.
• Recover from AI-related security incidents.
• Ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
• Prepare for future AI threats.

You are an AI Risk Manager if you have minimal AI deployments combined with the full spectrum of fine-grained controls. You understand that there are significant AI benefits to be had, but are taking a slow, measured, and controlled journey to AI deployment. By ensuring tight control over every step of the process, you minimize their risks, albeit at the cost of time-to-value for AI deployments.

If you deploy AI throughout your organization and have adopted a complete spectrum of fine-grained control over your AI use, you are an AI Operator of Excellence. Your organization can realize all the benefits of AI while minimizing your risks and can do so rapidly.

Transforming Into an AI Operator of Excellence

Achieving operational excellence with AI entails more than just adopting cutting-edge technologies; it requires thoughtful and strategic implementation with a focus on minimizing risks.

By understanding the different levels of AI maturity, associated risks, and the full spectrum of controls, you can make informed decisions that balance innovation with security. Whether you are an Immature AI Adopter, an AI Innovator, an AI Risk Manager, or an AI Operator of Excellence, the key is to continuously evolve and adapt your AI strategies and controls to meet the ever-changing landscape of technology and business needs. Embrace AI with a comprehensive approach to the full spectrum of controls and governance, and you will unlock AI’s full potential while safeguarding your organization against potential pitfalls. 

At Acuvity,  we’re developing the tools and best practices to empower you to achieve operational excellence with AI, ensuring that you remain competitive, adaptive, and resilient. Your journey towards AI excellence is ongoing, and with the right mindset, guidance, and tools, your organization can lead the way in this transformative era.