Infusing AI into IBM’s Workflows
Drive $900m in value through AI and position IBM as “Client Zero.”
One of my last consulting engagements on IBM Design for AI was with the Transformation team (i.e. my future team), consulting the executives overseeing IBM's Cognitive Enterprise 2020 initiative to drive $900m in value from AI. My responsibilities included designing, planning, and executing the kickoff workshop, out of which came a shortlist of high-priority projects in lead-to-cash and source-to-pay. After getting staffed on Transformation full time, I served as the design lead, and worked in tandem with strategy, engineering, data science, product, research, senior executives to define and deliver the MVP for the new Buy@IBM experience. This included the new landing page as well as conversation design for its AI agent.
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Background
Cognitive Enterprise 2020 (CE 2020) was a cross-enterprise effort to embed AI into every core process within IBM e.g. source-to-pay, lead-to-cash, record-to-report, etc., and in the process become "client zero" for AI transformation, generating over $900m in value. This case study and initiative covers source to pay. All activities related to procurement, from identifying a need for a product or service to making the final payment to the supplier.
[Talk about the org design]
Opportunity
All activities related to procurement, from identifying a need for a product or service to making the final payment to the supplier.
How might we...
Use AI to improve the requester experience, increase buyer productivity, and decrease the cost per support interaction.
Design Challenge
An AI-agent that simplifies, standardizes, & streamlines source-to-pay operations and improves the experience of requesters, buyers and suppliers.
Our Approach
Our approach was as follows:
- Research - Find where the gaps are in the user experience.
- Define the MVP & MVK, i.e. Minimum Viable Knowledge -
- Prototype and test -
- Build and refine -
The Deliverables
We shipped the new requester experience, as well as its Slack integration (shown at the top of page). In order to shape the longterm success of the implementation team, I also left them with my very short design best practices.
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The most salient takeaways from this body of work were:
- The effectiveness and versatility of Enterprise Design Thinking as an alignment tool.
- How decisions get made, then cascade.
- I wanted to see more work through from end-to-end (idea through execution).
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Let's talk details.
To save you from more of my yapping, let's make this a two-way conversation. Happy to share more details, links, assets, and behind the scenes info over a call.