If 2023 was the year of AI hype and 2024 the year of AI testing, 2025 has to be the year of AI value. Everyone expects effectiveness and efficiency gains from AI, but how do we turn expectation into reality?
Transform is helping organisations embrace tomorrow with confidence by overcoming these common barriers to AI.
Knowing where to start
To assess how AI can support your business, start with the foundational question: what are we trying to achieve? The answer will allow you to align your AI ambitions to your organisation’s strategies and goals. And we can help.
- We run AI Academies which provide a foundational understanding of the different types and potential use cases of AI.
- Our AI Impact Assessments create organisation specific AI use cases for efficiency and effectiveness gains.
- Transform’s AI Labs take use cases and build proof of concepts to validate opportunities and business cases. These have ranged from helping front-line teams better engage and manage inbound queries, to writing procurement processes, to automated insight generation and predictions.
Data availability and quality
Data quality and availability have been barriers to getting value from data for most organisations for many years and is one of the single biggest barriers to turning AI tests into production.
We help organisations from data strategy to data products creating data and technology platforms in service to people, processes and systems to support delivering the outcomes required for value.
We recommend:
- That your AI Strategy and Data Strategies align to create an understanding of what data needs to be available, in the right quality and quantities to deliver your AI use case
- Supervising the use of new AI tools to support data quality management
- Taking a product approach by starting small and iterating, focusing on delivering priority AI use cases and measuring value
Ethical, Legal and Environmental concerns
We advocate a holistic approach to assessing risks and opportunities throughout AI business casing, experimentation and adoption. Each organisation’s context is unique in terms of ethical and legal considerations while the environmental impact from greater data storage,compute power and embodied carbon and materials in AI-specific hardware is a common challenge.
We recommend aligning Governance across the organisation, bringing corporate, data and IT governance together into one interconnected conversation with shared opportunities and risks. It’s important to connect the dots, taking a system-thinking approach to how AI is proactively developed across the organisation, minimising the risks and maximising the impact.
Shortage of knowledge and skills
While vast quantities of clever code are available openly and anyone can write a prompt for free to use LLMs, building a system that is sufficiently reliable,explainable and human facing, to represent your organisation requires a range of skills many organisations don’t possess.
For example:
- Data Scientists to select, train and maintain Machine Learning models and neural networks
- DevOps and MLOps Engineers to turn proof of concepts and minimum viable products into reliable, reusable products and services
- AI & Data Product Managers bringing product management principles, experience and techniques to build trusted and reliable AI-enabled products and services
Investment
Getting started doesn’t have to require large-scale investment in technology, data, talent and training. A phased investment approach, starting with smaller-scale pilot projects, delivered using Transform’s experts alongside client teams, demonstrating AI's potential, sharing knowledge as we co-deliver leads to more accurate and affordable business cases.
Human-centred design thinking
AI and data enabled products and services need to be technically brilliant, and human, otherwise they will fail as an experience. Having teams of technical people working collaboratively with researchers and designers is critical to diverse thinking and brilliant execution.
We wish everyone success in moving from AI experimentation into action in 2025. If you're interested in our AI Academies, Impact Assessments, Labs or other services please get in touch at transformation@TransformUK.com.