AI for Enterprise:

Building an AI Strategy
to Delight Customers

Custom content for Coursera by studioID

A seamless customer experience has quickly emerged
as a critical differentiator for businesses across all
industries.1 And the bar is set high – using artificial
intelligence (AI) to deliver touches like personalization,
gamification and around-the-clock customer support
has become an all but everyday expectation for a large
number of consumers. 2

But while the majority of enterprise organizations

recognizes the value of AI in the customer experience,
many struggle to make progress with creating an
AI strategy that works for their organization. More
often than not, it’s because of a pervasive belief that
technology and people are separate, when in reality,
the most effective AI strategy combines the two. In fact,
McKinsey & Company found that companies adopting AI
across the organization are investing as much in people
and processes as in technology.3

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Creating Customer-Centric Products
and Experiences

“AI is not an add-on to a customer experience strategy; it’s a complete organizational

change,” says former senior data scientist at Coursera and senior data scientist at
Pinterest. “An effective AI strategy allows people to understand the possibilities
of technology and apply them to the customer experience. Ultimately, it enables
organizations to be agile in response to ongoing changes in customer behavior.”

Source: CRO Box

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Here are the five foundations
that organizations can use to create
the in-demand, customer-centric
experiences consumers have come
to expect:

Creating an Enterprise
AI Strategy
1 Define what it means to have
a data-driven culture

2 Assess and organize your

data infrastructure

3 Agree on a common vocabulary

4 Get C-suite buy-in

5 Map out a talent strategy

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1
Define what it means to
have a data-driven culture
The first obstacle to creating a holistic AI strategy The best way to arrive at this answer is to decide how
within an organization is creating alignment around your organization wants to use data to create a more
the ultimate goal. What does it mean, exactly, to have a customer-centric experience. For example, organizations
data-driven culture? For some organizations, that might like Salesforce use AI to help their customers more easily
mean implementing AI technology into operations like understand and engage their audience with real-time
marketing or customer service. For others, it means a decisioning, predictive analysis, conversational assistants,
top-to-bottom integration of how data and AI can be used and more. Within seconds, AI processes take into account
in all roles within an organization. Success lies in agreeing hundreds of thousands of data points such as when their
on a common definition and setting shared goals. audience logged on and the most recent interaction with a
Salesforce agent to recommend the best next step for the
Salesforce agent.5

“Because AI is still new, a lot of talent that works outside

the technology space, like product or marketing, doesn’t
have as much experience with it,” says Bakthavachalam.
“As a result, there can be a communication gap that
must be bridged with a common language so that you
can productively work together. Everyone within an
organization needs to know enough about AI to be able to
take what the data scientists are doing and incorporate it
into their roadmap.”

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“
Seeing results from an AI strategy requires
employees to have an openness to trying and failing
things, a real innovation mindset. If that ecosystem
is not created, it could be a real roadblock to
implementing AI in an effective way.”

FLORIAN QUARRÉ
Chief Strategy Officer at Exponential AI

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2
Assess and organize your
data infrastructure

Before an organization can make great strides in using

AI to develop a customer-centric experience, it will
need to do a complete assessment of its current data
infrastructure. What kind of existing technology, tools,
workflows and customer data sets are already available?

The conversation often focuses on big data, but Florian

Quarré, chief strategy officer at Exponential AI, notes
that customer-centricity most often relies on large data
sets filled with many small data points about consumers,
in general, and customers, in particular. In order for an
AI strategy to have the maximum impact, we believe
it must be built up around an ecosystem where AI can
piece together all of the behavioral signals coming from data points and piece together the complexity to quickly
customers that pertain to a business. sift through and identify patterns more quickly and
more accurately,” said Quarré. “Once an organization
“Regardless of the industry you’re looking at, the has access to all of its data, AI can paint a very nuanced
area where AI plays the most dramatic role in helping picture of the customers that pertain to the business and
better understand customers is when it can take an the industry in which organization operates, acting as a
organization’s massive data set of volumetric, small true force multiplier.”

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“
Machine learning, natural-language understanding and
natural-language processing can help analyze customer
sentiment and customer feedback at scale, precision
and speed not achievable through humans.”

JESSICA EKHOLM
VP Analyst at Gartner6

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3
Agree on
a common
vocabulary
Terms like “data-driven culture” and “AI strategy” are
broad terms and may be difficult to grasp in practical
ways – and it can get even more confusing as employees
“
When organizations take the time
to educate their existing workforce
come into contact with more specific and technical
language related to AI technology. It’s important about AI, they’re able to capture
to contextualize these terms for employees so that and achieve so much more. The
everyone is working from the same vocabulary, whether
broad up-leveling of the finance or
they’re engineers with more practical AI knowledge
or marketing teams that need to understand the marketing team acts as a rising tide
possibilities and limits of the technology. that lifts all boats – the extent to
which the entire organization can
“Everyone needs to be able to speak the same
language and communicate with one another,” take advantage of the potential of
says Bakthavachalam. “It’s not helpful if people are AI rises at an order of magnitude.”
using terms or thinking about things in a way that
isn’t able to be translated to someone else. No one
ASHLEY NICOLS
expects executives or product managers to become
data scientists, but it’s helpful to have a high-level
Account Manager at Coursera
understanding of the terminology.”

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4
Get C-suite buy-in

Creating buy-in for an AI strategy is critical and, more

often than not, that will start with the C-suite. Not only
does the executive leadership of a company set and
reinforce the organization’s overall vision, but their
support of AI will make or break the investment. In fact,
about 71% of companies surveyed indicated that the
C-suite owns AI projects because they’re the only ones
who can bring together various departments’ leaders to
work through the application of AI.7

According to Quarré, one of the most effective ways to

drive C-suite buy-in is to start with small applications of
AI that are likely to demonstrate the value and purpose
of AI. From there, you can use that success story to gain
momentum within the company to complete a third and
fourth project, and so on.

“Once you’ve shown AI can have a real impact within

your organization, the department-wide transformation
spreads into an enterprise-wide transformation,” says
Quarré. “The champions that have gone through the effort
feel empowered to apply the AI mentality to anything that
might bring transformation to the organization.”

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“
ML and AI are broadly accepted as impactful business
technologies. The question individual companies
struggle with is, ‘How do we have an AI strategy for
ourselves?’ Executives must balance many priorities at
once. The only way building an AI strategy will rise to
the top is if the potential business results on customer
experience are crystal clear.”

VINOD BAKTHAVACHALAM
Former Senior Data Scientist at Coursera
and Senior Data Scientist at Pinterest

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5
Map out a talent
strategy

Putting a clear AI strategy into place will quickly reveal

the skill set gaps in an organization’s workforce, and
organizations will need to bring in new talent for most
technical roles that support AI.

In fact, in one study of 12,000 firms, 64% of leaders say

they have already benefited from reskilling programs,
and 93% are actively building the skills of their workers
or have plans to.8 “Working with Coursera, eight different
companies were able to expand employee skill sets
and value such that the companies expected to achieve
a return on investment of approximately 700% over
the course of three years.”9 Reskilling and upskilling
will only become more important as time goes on and
organizations realize it can be up to six times more
expensive to hire technical talent externally than to build
those skills internally.10

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“
When a company has access to an elastic data infrastructure
as well as talent that understands how to use AI as a
framework, it is empowered to create that differentiated,
tailored and personalized customer experience that is in
demand today. And when applied and leveraged adequately,
that’s how AI brings the accelerator and force multiplier that
we’ve only been able to dance around in the past.”

FLORIAN QUARRÉ
Chief Strategy Officer at Exponential AI

Coursera’s approach to professional development11

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- Identify gaps in the workforce

- Curate and build custom content

- Launch learning program

and drive adoption

- Transform the workforce to

capitalize on the organization’s
greatest opportunities

Using AI to create a
customer-centric experience

It’s no secret that AI is a powerful tool organizations

can harness to deliver a customer-centric experience.
But many organizations are still piecing together what
an AI strategy might look like for their organization.
Organizations that want to remain competitive will
adopt AI to create customer-centric experiences, and
they’ll start by making sure their existing workforce has
the knowledge, resources and tools it needs to do so.

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Sources
1 “Customers 2020: A Progress Report,” Walker, https://www.walkerinfo.com/knowledge-center/featured-research-reports/customers-2020-a-
progress-report

2 “What consumers want: Personalization, attention, great experience,” Retail Customer Experience, https://www.retailcustomerexperience.
com/news/what-consumers-want-personalization-attention-great-experience/

3 “Getting to scale with artificial intelligence,” McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-

insights/getting-to-scale-with-artificial-intelligence

4 “How to Deliver Personalized B2B Experiences With AI,” CMS Wire, https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/how-to-deliver-personalized-
b2b-experiences-with-ai/

5 “How Salesforce is Driving Customer Success Using Lightning & Einstein Analytics,” Salesforce, https://www.salesforce.com/video/1758467/

6 “Improve Customer Experience With Artificial Intelligence,” Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/improve-customer-

experience-with-artificial-intelligence/

7 “Why the C-Suite is now overseeing corporate A.I. projects,” Fortune Magazine, https://fortune.com/2020/06/23/why-the-c-suite-is-now-
overseeing-corporate-a-i-projects/

8 “Leading businesses reveal the power of combining human ingenuity with AI,” Microsoft, https://news.microsoft.com/transform/leading-
businesses-reveal-the-power-of-combining-human-ingenuity-with-ai/

9 “Coursera for Business Enables Organizations to Expand Their Employees’ Skill Sets and Value,” IDC, [Link to Report]

10 “The Year Ahead:Reinventing Work, Reinventing HR, Reinventing Ourselves,” Josh Bersin, https://ss-usa.s3.amazonaws.com/c/308463326/
media/99655e37c4f5562ec91144843230598/2020_PredictionReport_v4%5B1%5D.pdf

11 “Coursera for Business Enables Organizations to Expand Their Employees’ Skill Sets and Value,” IDC, [Link to Report]

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