Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI delivers business value by improving efficiency, cutting costs, enhancing customer experience, and unlocking new revenue opportunities. It helps automate routine tasks, generate insights from data, and create personalised experiences at scale. To measure ROI, it's important to define clear success metrics from the start—such as time saved, cost reductions, revenue uplift, or customer satisfaction improvements. Comparing pre- and post-AI performance gives a clearer picture of both direct and indirect benefits.

AI can be applied to a wide range of industry-specific challenges. It’s commonly used to automate manual processes, analyse large datasets, forecast demand, detect fraud, personalise customer interactions, and improve decision-making. For example, in healthcare AI supports diagnostics and patient triage, in finance it enables smarter risk management, and in retail it powers recommendation engines and inventory forecasting. The key is to start with high-impact problems where good data already exists.

Start small and focused. Choose a business problem with clear value potential and measurable outcomes and run a pilot project to test what’s possible. Build internal awareness and basic AI literacy across teams and assess your current data environment. Many businesses start by using pre-built AI tools from cloud providers or working with a partner to accelerate outcomes. As you learn from early projects, you can scale up AI across the organisation.

AI relies on high-quality, relevant, and well-structured data. If your data is siloed, incomplete, or inconsistent, it may need preparation before being used in AI models. Getting your data ready means understanding what you have, putting governance in place, addressing quality issues, and ensuring data is accessible and securely stored. Starting with a data audit or AI readiness assessment can help identify what work is needed before moving forward.

An AI project usually includes six key stages: identifying the use case, gathering and preparing data, building or selecting an AI model, testing and validating it, deploying into your environment, and then monitoring performance. Costs are influenced by data preparation, technical talent, software tools, infrastructure (especially cloud computing), and the complexity of integration. Smaller proof-of-concept projects are often used to manage risk and cost before wider rollout.

Responsible AI requires clear governance and transparency. That means setting ethical guidelines, ensuring explainability of AI decisions, protecting data privacy, and identifying potential bias in datasets and models. Organisations should implement frameworks for oversight, human review, and ongoing risk assessments. Staying across local regulations and global best practices is critical, especially in sensitive industries such as healthcare or finance.

A strong AI team usually includes data scientists, engineers, software developers, and domain experts who understand the business context. Governance and ethics roles are also becoming essential. Many organisations start with a small, cross-functional team or a centralised AI centre of excellence. You can build capability by upskilling existing employees, hiring new talent, or working with external AI partners. Ongoing learning is key as AI continues to evolve quickly.