Three Essential Questions About AI for Our Organization

As we continue to integrate AI into our daily operations, I’d like to share three fundamental questions everyone should feel confident answering. These aren’t technical deep-dives, they’re the guiding principles that will help each of us spot opportunities, avoid pitfalls, and ensure we wield AI responsibly across all levels of our organization.

1. How Does It Work?

Why it matters: Understanding AI at a conceptual level empowers you to identify where it can help and where it can’t.

Key point: AI “learning” differs from human learning. While a person might summarize a million customer records by calculating averages, AI models can ingest each data point to spot patterns.

What you need: Basic data literacy, know what your numbers mean and be aware of potential biases in your data sets.

2. What Is It Good At?

Why it matters: AI shines when it can use massive, reliable data and clear rules to make predictions or categorizations. It’s ideal for repetitive, volume-driven tasks.

Key point: AI is excellent at forecasting based on historical data, think expense-report automation, personalized recommendations, or demand forecasting.

What you need: Be able to spot mundane, high-volume processes in your work where a rule-based, pattern-driven solution could save time without compromising quality.

3. What Should It Never Do?

Why it matters: Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean we should. AI lacks human judgment, ethics, and the ability to understand context.

Key point: Tasks requiring empathy, moral reflection, or nuanced decision-making, such as hiring decisions, disciplinary actions, or strategic planning, hence must remain in human hands.

What you need: A clear sense of which decisions require human oversight and a willingness to speak up if an AI system is overstepping ethical or operational boundaries.

Next Steps for Our Team:

1. Internal training sessions on data literacy and AI fundamentals.

2. Team workshops to map out “high-volume, low-judgment” tasks ripe for AI support.

3. Ethics review panels to vet proposed AI use cases and define limits on AI decision-making.

By ensuring everyone is asking these three questions, we’ll unlock AI’s potential to streamline our workflows, boost our productivity, and maintain the human touch that makes our organization truly exceptional.

Let’s embrace AI wisely.

Cheers,

Haluan