At ThreeStones, we believe the real differentiator in the AI era will come from AI agents trained on your proprietary data AND your specific organization’s knowledge. Agentic agents to support your staff, in collecting data from customer input pro-actively (tender documents, customer contacts, GCS and specs, … up to and including shifting workload to less technical/knowledgeable staff to make the job more interesting – of both the lower knowledge ànd the more knowledgeable staff!!
After all, the more generic based AI can be sourced or subcontracted, regardless of what your core activity is. You specific core business knowledge cannot !! However, most probably, you will need to step up your game to get there.
The key to driving disruption—rather than being disrupted by your competition—is how well you manage to document your data. Make it actionable (indexed, referenced, …), reliable and kept up to data and fast available. Only then it brings value.
And that whole endeavor is a stiff challenge. Here is why:
Proprietary agentic AI will boost efficiency across the human side of the business: Engineering, Sales Support, Customer Service, and After-Sales.
However,
- AI effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of your documented knowledge. Unlike humans—who can reason, interpret context, and rely on experience and training to navigate the current documentation reality: documents developed for the human interface, – but AI is a statistics game. If the data and knowledge used to train your AI is unreliable or not specific enough, it doesn’t solve problems; it simply amplifies the chaos and accelerates the flaws embedded in your knowledge base.
- AI effectiveness also depends on adoption of the tool. That is where most change initiatives fail.
What does this mean for your business?
- Process impact: Knowledge must be managed just as rigorously as data, with AI in mind. This means implementing lifecycle management on your overall knowledge, not just your core intellectual property: engineering knowledge, product design knowledge, and service knowledge and all associated documentation.
That means change management. - Business impact: The aim of AI is to create value for the business. That means that the Agent needs to be designed carefully and with consideration of the processes in which they will take part in your core business processes.
- Human impact: Adopting effective AI is disruptive to your internal operations, especially on the human aspects. It has a foundational impact on our workforce. Adoption is key. That will require developing a change muscle and adopting new change methodologies as well as new management strategies.
- Board and top management impact: top down wil not cut it. You will need to reinvent your business culture and strategy, your decision making processes, shift authority. For long the management focus was on Result and procedure. Rationalisation, centralization, control and economies of scale dominated the narrative. Geopolitics and technological advancements have changed that. Agility and adaptability will be key in the decade to come. But that essential ability I hard to transform into. Because that requires a culture that is much more nuanced and critical. One that accepts, no adopts diversity, preferably the cognitive kind. And that is probably the biggest and hardest transformation.
So this isn’t just a process update. It must be executed in parallel with top management, culture and maturity change. It is about ability, then speed. Top management will have to trust middle management with a portion of the operational decision power (which fosters ownership and engagement where you need it, @middle management!). And will have to focus on scenario thinking, transparency and goveranance on a strong foundation: Strategy è processes, WI, R&R, organogram + Culture + maturity: process, IT, Data.
High maturity and “good” culture is directly correlated with Transformation adoption. ThreeStones has developed an innovative, proactive new methodology that works on all these elements. Fostering engagement before resistance develops through co-creation bottom up in the solution development, from within. Paving the new ways in the development stage pro-actively – with top down governance. Iterating between both, spiralling gradually up into a reliable, rugged, durable and well balanced outcome.
Only then can AI be successfully integrated into your organizational fabric—aligned with its job descriptions, authority definition, escalation and reporting policy and training requirements. That is when AI truly starts creating value, exponentially.
Are you ready to turn your knowledge into your competitive advantage?
Read all my insights or reach out directly for strategy development, impact assessment, and transformation execution.