How Innovation Workshops Can Help People Better Understand GenAI Use Cases

Using the approach described in this article, you can identify a consensus-based set of GenAI use cases, focusing on opportunities that are both tactically and strategically valuable, thereby supporting your implementation roadmap.

When it comes to identifying and prioritizing enterprise-wide business value opportunities, the principles for GenAI use cases are actually not that different from any other technology-related scenarios. The key is cost-effectiveness and a set of priorities.

Advantages of the GenAI Workshop

Having led hundreds of innovation workshops around the world for the public and private sectors, many of which focused on AI/ML, data, and analytics, I’ve found that this type of design-based brainstorming session is well suited for GenAI as well as other strategic technology trends.

The workshop method typically involves taking 10 to 25 people from across the organization and leading them through a two- to four-hour creative session to identify and prioritize their ideas. The number of participants, length of time, and number of voting criteria all need to follow the "just right" principle, which was learned through multiple experiments and refinements. Of course, there are many different ways to conduct an innovation workshop or brainstorming session, but the following is one method that works well. No matter which method or format you ultimately choose, consistency is key.

We started with an opening introduction to share the overall goals and objectives of the workshop, followed by a brief pep talk from the project sponsor, and then a 30-minute electronic ideation session during which participants could enter their ideas into the group decision-making support software and comment on or add to others’ ideas in person, online, or a hybrid format.

This is followed by a 1- to 2-hour “elevator pitch” session, where each participant typically pitches their idea for a minute or two, during which time everyone can hear each other’s ideas, have a quick discussion to clarify issues, and then take individual votes.

Finally, we spend 30 minutes having each participant vote on all the ideas based on the previous presentations. The final step is to preview the voting results and outcomes. An executive summary and a set of formal deliverables are shared within a few days after the meeting.

To make the process consistent and repeatable, I prefer to use a clear and balanced set of voting criteria to help place each idea into a cost-benefit matrix (often called a project prioritization matrix). We use two voting criteria for business benefit: strategic fit and business value. For ease of implementation or cost, the criteria used are time and cost to implement and maintain, and project risk and complexity.

Each criterion was scored on a 1-3-5 point scale and aggregated into a final cost-benefit chart with business benefits plotted on the y-axis and ease of implementation plotted on the x-axis.

This approach allows participants to clearly see the ranking of their ideas. If they are tactical opportunities, they will appear in the upper right quadrant (i.e., high business benefits and easy to implement), while strategic opportunities will appear in the upper left quadrant (i.e., high business benefits, but time-consuming, costly, and risky to implement). Each type of opportunity has its own advantages. Tactical opportunities naturally support short-term implementation roadmaps, while strategic opportunities support long-term implementation roadmaps.

Advantages of GenAI

A significant benefit of this approach is that it is consensus-based, and through group participation, you can allow team members to generate and share ideas and vote on each other's ideas. By carefully selecting participants, this approach can support both top-down and bottom-up thinking, including ideas from leadership as well as end users. An added benefit of this type of workshop is that you can bring together team members who would not normally have the opportunity to meet, allowing for cross-fertilization of ideas and diverse perspectives.

Another advantage is that you can quickly generate a large number of ideas for further investigation and analysis. The prioritization method in the workshop uses a rough filter to help identify "quick wins" and "must haves", and each idea can then be further analyzed as needed to develop a detailed business case and ROI. Some ideas can also be merged into broader projects, while some can be temporarily shelved for later exploration or even discarded as needed.

Of course, many use cases for GenAI arise spontaneously and are outside the scope of the workshop. For these scenarios, you can simply have someone record them as existing ideas and prioritize them in the same way so that they can be displayed in the cost-benefit matrix, which helps to show the big picture and the positioning of these ideas. You may also identify adjacent or similar projects that can be integrated into existing projects, or vice versa.

If you find that there are too many use cases for GenAI to cover in a single meeting, you can also split the workshop into separate meetings by department or branch. The same can be done by functional area, such as IT, operations, sales, marketing, legal, finance, human resources, etc. Your Chief AI Officer can collect results from each meeting and see how these results support the overall AI strategy and implementation plan across the enterprise.

While there are many unique aspects of GenAI, there are also many similarities. Using tried-and-true methods such as innovation workshops and cost-benefit analyses—starting with a broad screen and then working your way down to a specific business case—is an effective way to organize your work and prioritize tactical and strategic opportunities.