The biggest mistake enterprise companies make when trying to implement AI

Enterprise companies rush into AI implementation without proper strategy or governance structures. David Rabin, Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo Solutions & Services Group, explains how to build organizational frameworks that enable successful AI adoption. He discusses establishing AI committees for tool evaluation and marketing governance, organizing data infrastructure including product databases and visual identity systems, and implementing Studio AI for automated marketing toolkit generation that delivers faster and cheaper content production. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is David Raven, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo's Solutions and Services Group, which helps companies build right-size AI solutions. And today, David is going to share how you can overcome organizational barriers that are blocking your AI adoption. All right, David, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of Martech-related questions generally surrounding this week's topic, which is embracing AI adoption. Are you ready?

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  Let's go.

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  All right. Number one, what's the biggest mistake you've seen enterprise companies make when trying to implement AI?

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  Probably running too fast into AI without some sort of a strategy or a safety net. And as a small solopreneur, you probably can get away with it. With a larger company, there's a little bit of process that has to go into place. We built an AI committee that do two things on the marketing side. They manage our marketing governance and they're out evaluating tools, right? We've got well over 1,000 people. On our global marketing department, we know there's tools out there that we should be using. We got a team evaluating them. Data is key. If your data is not in good shape, properly organized, you're going to fail. For us with Studio AI, we're able to pull together a product reference database, a visual identity database, a tone of voice database, an image library. But if we couldn't do that, Studio AI as a tool would not work.

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  And then I think the last thing is about, you got to know what success looks like for you. Let's go back to the faster, cheaper, better. For me with Studio AI, it was faster and cheaper. We will get to the better, but I'm not challenging the team saying, this looks like crap compared to what the agency did that took, or the designer did that took two weeks and cost $25,000. I mean, if it's crap, it's crap. We're not going to use it. But if it's good enough right now, great, let's roll with it.

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  What I'm hearing from you is first off, garbage in, garbage out, right? If you're trying to implement AI and your house is a mess, you're going to be feeding bad data into AI. You're not going to have the right context. And so the results of whatever you're trying to do are not going to be good. And so to me, it seems like the biggest mistake is making sure you've got your house in order before you add this additional layer of technology that should help simplify and allow you to move better, faster and cheaper.

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  Sure, but the flip side is you got to start. You cannot wait. And in fact, when we talk to customers, we're sort of in the heyday right now of generative AI, but right around the corner is Agentic AI. I've got this vision that with our Studio AI tool, instead of a marketer actually having to do the prompts, we're just going to tell the tool, oh, by the way, in 30 days, we're about to launch this new product. Marketer then can expect in about a week, they're going to wake up and in their inbox is going to be all the whole marketing toolkit for that product without even having to prompt it. So if you don't start now, it's going to start getting really difficult to catch up. You just got to do something.

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  Maybe the biggest mistake is not getting started fast enough. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to David Raven, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo Solutions and Services Group for joining us. If you'd like to contact David, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit his company's website, which is lenovo.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge, In your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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