by Sara McNamara

A comprehensive, practical template built for the MOPs pro tasked with both exploration and execution. These are AI-powered processes you can actually set up, govern, and optimize.

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✋ Setting the Stage: Ignore the Hype

Many AI-company CEOs are speculating that AI will take over all human jobs, or replace salespeople altogether…while the technology may be able to mature quickly, think about the cultural shifts that will have to take place in order for this to happen.

I don’t see those shifts happening overnight.

HOWEVER, as operations professionals, we do need to keep up with AI and use it to our advantage. We need to take the IBM approach: learn to run the machines, so we don’t get replaced completely by them. Learn to be as productive as possible with as few people as possible.

🔍 Best Practices with AI

There are a few best practices to keep in mind when we talk about AI:

1. Remember: AI hallucinates. Look to verify every metric or statement it makes — it can be good to get you started or to help you think outside-the-box on a complex problem, but it isn’t a supergenius. It aims to please, so if it doesn’t know an answer, it will BS and pretend it does. Use, but verify.
2. Always have a human review content before it goes out to the general public. Because AI hallucinates, and because it can contain biases, it’s important to have human oversight of any external communications. No matter what any CEO tries to order you to do, AI cannot function completely on its own. This about AI as augmentation, not replacement.
3. Start small. Run experiments with trusted stakeholders and only expand use cases once they’re working. This is true for basically any major change, by the way — best to battle-test before launching more broadly.
4. Be sensitive with PII (personal identifiable information) and work with your legal/compliance representatives. AI is not well-regulated right now, but that doesn’t mean that you should throw PII in there or put your company’s sensitive information in there. Work with legal to make sure you understand their stance on current law and what use cases you can run. Yes, sadly, if you work for a public company…this probably means that your use cases will be tiny for now. Sorry. 😬

The Cost of Using AI vs. Humans

Here are some examples of the cost of using AI vs. using Humans on tasks:

On face value, it looks like using AI is cheaper than human efforts. HOWEVER — most AI still requires human intervention, whether it’s through the prompting phase, iteration phase, and/or review phase. There is no totally-independent AI.