Want to put AI to work in your organization? Start with an ideation session...

You might think that’s a strange name. But over the past few years, I’ve had many conversations for my AI podcast, Snoek op Zolder, with AI researchers, as well as musicians who don’t know much about AI. What struck me was that researchers often speak enthusiastically about all the things AI can do and see it as ethically responsible, while musicians almost always found AI “scary”. So, if you’re thinking about how to use AI in your organisation, it’s a great idea to start with an objective scale for assessing the ethical implications of an idea for an AI application.

A second aspect to consider when brainstorming potential AI applications is added value. You don’t want a whole team of AI specialists building an application only for the organization to decide it isn’t very useful once it’s ready. Start by asking questions such as: What will this idea add to the organization’s processes? Could it bring financial benefits? Or help make the organization more innovative? These are all factors that say something about how useful an AI application is to the organization or society.

These two aspects make up the fear matrix, where the dotted lines show the area containing ideas for AI applications that are both ethically responsible and useful. In the next step, you’ll develop the AI applications that fall in the top-right area—and are therefore both useful and ethically responsible—into what’s called an epic one-pager. How? I’ll explain in a following video.