AI Readiness

While AI Is in High Demand, Organizational Readiness Lags

Many organizations adopt AI before laying the necessary groundwork.

• Purchasing before planning: Companies rush to acquire AI-powered tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, or industry-specific solutions without assessing whether they can support, scale, or effectively integrate them. It is vital that organizations do their research and fully understand the level of effort required to deploy technologies.
• Struggling with ROI: While AI promises efficiency, productivity, and cost savings, many organizations don’t see immediate returns.  This is most often due to either the level of effort required to implement properly or a lack of documented processes, procedures and knowledge to effectively enable the AI.
• Fragmented adoption: Employees often seek their own AI tools outside official company deployments, leading to security concerns and inconsistent usage. This is especially true for organizations without a proper AI use policy or employee education around the appropriate use and risks of AI.

Address These Challenges Before Implementing AI

To ensure AI adoption leads to real benefits, organizations must first address these core challenges:

Data Readiness

AI thrives on high-quality, well-organized data. Without high-quality information, even the best AI tools will struggle to provide meaningful results. Before deploying AI, organizations must focus on building a strong data foundation.

• Do you have a solid Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to track assets, services and assigned users accurately?
• Are knowledgebases and process documentation up to date?

AI tools need structured data to interpret and support tasks—whether it’s automating tickets, recommending next steps, or summarizing content. Well-maintained CMDBs, user guides and customer data repositories are critical to success.

Selecting the Right Solution

With so many AI solutions now available with different capabilities, levels of security, and use cases – choosing the right tool can be difficult.

• Have you mapped out your organization’s use cases before selecting a tool?  What would have the biggest impact on your business by introducing AI?
• Will employees embrace the solution and properly utilize it?

Microsoft Copilot, for example, may offer good enterprise data security but in its current state can be perceived as clunky and limited compared to ChatGPT’s broader knowledgebase.

AI adoption will suffer and security risks will increase if employees choose to bypass approved tools in favor of alternate AI solutions. To put it plainly, we often see organization invest is Copilot as their selected AI assistant however employees are still utilizing ChatGPT and numerous other tools they find more effective without understanding the potential risks.

Reading the Fine Print

No matter what solution is selected, security and how data will be used by the AI must be part of every selection process.

• Have you carefully reviewed the agreements, terms of service and use policies of each solution?

Unfortunately, many AI plugins, notetaker applications and online AI tools have incredibly far-reaching terms of use agreements that include such things as:

• The ability to collect, analyze and use your data for further training and learning.  This may seem fairly obvious for data uploaded/shared but in many cases can include capturing adjacent data about the user, endpoint performance, etc.
• The ability to monitor, analyze and even share with 3rd parties all data including meeting chats, audio, voice data, shared content, etc. This can extend to accessing calendars, social media content and emails.

These tools are usually very easy to set up and offer free trials for users, making it easy for employees to begin using them without truly understanding the risks.

Employee Readiness and Governance

As is so often the case when it comes to security, employee education and proper governance might be the most important areas to achieve greatest impact.

• Do you have an AI use policy or is AI part of your existing acceptable use policy?
• Are employees trained from day one on how to use AI properly and securely?
• Are there sufficient governance tools in place to prevent improper use or data sharing with non-sanctioned AI?

Bottomline

AI is a powerful enabler with constantly increasing capabilities and solutions. However, organizations must resist the urge to adopt too quickly and focus on the foundational elements of data readiness, solution selection, security and employee training to ensure they get the most out of their AI investment. By planning ahead and making informed choices, companies can move beyond AI hype and truly maximize its value.