Wrapping up 2024

We have come so far with AI and yet achieved so little in terms of the organisational change it makes possible. Here's how we made sense of the year AI finally arrived.

What a year it has been for those of us interested in the future of work and smart organisations!

We have seen incredible developments in AI tools and LLMs, culminating in the preview release of OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model last week.

The tech is developing faster (and at great expense) than our ability to absorb it and adapt to it, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the enterprise.

Next week at the year end, we will look forward to 2025 and consider the huge opportunity in front of us to massively reduce the costs of doing business, whilst at the same time putting people front and centre of the way work is done. This could re-vitalise struggling private and public sector institutions, but it will also catapult small, imaginative teams to the top of the value creation league by allowing us to do much, much more with less time, resource and bureaucracy.

But for now, here is a wrap up of 2024 from all of us at Shift*Academy, with some actionable insights and practical implementation playbooks and techniques that might come in handy in 2025.

TL;DR

I asked ChatGPT to summarise what we wrote about in 2024:

"In 2024, ShiftAcademy extensively explored the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into enterprise operations, emphasizing practical applications, organizational readiness, and the transformative potential of AI technologies."*

It listed our key topics in 2024 as:

• Enterprise AI Implementation and Case Studies

• Advancements in AI Capabilities

• Organizational Readiness and Cultural Adaptation

• Enhancing Productivity and Operational Agility

• Strategic Metrics and Competitive Intelligence

• Future Outlook and Continuous Improvement

Twelve Insights for the Holidays

Here is a human-curated selection of key articles from each month of 2024:

1. Don’t Fear the Coming Trough of AI Disillusionment

   We started 2024 predicting it would be a big year for enterprise AI adoption, but also that we need to think long-term and not be driven by either the hype or the backlash to the hype.

2. Could AI Be A Catalyst For Wider Organisational Change?

   In February, we focused on AI's productivity potential, if it can avoid the Solow Paradox; how it can help re-invent middle management; and, how we think AI could catalyse previous waves of change in organisations.

3. Four Areas of AI Readiness We Need to Improve

   In March, we looked at the implementation barriers organisations need to overcome with people and adoption issues, org structure, tech stack limitations, and a lack of connected data and knowledge.

4. Centaur service teams and the role of narrow AI in organisations

   In April, amid lots of 'inside baseball' noise about OpenAI, we recommended not to focus on the theoretical goal of AGI when we already have the tools to transform work, for example by creating hybrid centaur service teams that make the most of people + AI/automation.

5. From Silos to Synergy: How to Organise for Collaborative Digital Leadership

   In May we looked at how organisations should organise cross-functional efforts to guide AI adoption, and shared this deep-dive playbook from our curriculum on how to form and run a Digital Leaders Group to oversee your capability roadmap and ensure alignment across major functions.

6. Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism or Just Sparkling Process Management?

   In June, we wrote about how AI is already unbundling tasks and management, and how this could lead to a re-bundling of task automations coordinated by agents, rather than just enterprise apps and chatbots.

7. How Could AI Agents Improve The Co-ordination of Work?

   Instead of taking to the beach in July like normal people, we dug into how AI could help defeat the "meeting-industrial complex" by creating an architecture of collaboration involving the best of people and AI agents as a way to solve the problem of coordinating work at scale without burying value creation below a bureaucratic hierarchy.

8. Don't Let the AGI Soap Opera Overshadow the Practical Applications of Enterprise AI

   This piece from August argued that the OpenAI drama remained an annoying distraction from the fact that existing LLMs and even SLMs are already enough to automate a great deal of boring repetitive tasks, and we some thoughts on how AI will shift its focus from individual components to products & systems.

9. Asking Better Questions

   This piece from September considers how human and machine languages have co-evolved to enable us to program with prompts, and soon perhaps we will be able to program organisations in the same way - the only limit (and perhaps the key skill) is the ability to ask better questions to define our goals as clearly as possible.

10. AI Use Cases: Shifting Focus From Personal to Organisational Productivity

    One paradox of AI that we wrote about in October is how slowly enterprise use cases are advancing compared to personal productivity use cases, and we looked at the 'secret cyborg' phenomenon and new hybrid AI roles, plus how connected knowledge repositories will be force multipliers for enterprise AI.

11. Towards the Smart Digital Workplace

    This piece from November considers how AI will finally mean the digital workplace (rather than stuffy meeting rooms) is where work really happens, and what this might mean for the enterprise software sector. Will we see a shift back to more in-house development?

12. Reasoning, Context and Agentic Enterprise AI Beyond LLMs

    In December, we looked at how LLMs are becoming just one component of AI systems as we move beyond a focus on synthetic content towards agentic automation and decision making. Will this remove the need for old-fashioned manual management, or will managers use AI to generate more work rituals and processes to justify their roles?

Practical Techniques and Playbooks

For our premium subscribers and practitioners, we shared some meaty, practical pieces to help guide implementation - an incredible value proposition (and easily expensable!) for any leader or manager interested is going deeper into the role of AI in organisational improvement.

Six digital business capability maps:

• Using a Capability Map to Design & Plan an AI Use Case for Digital Talent Discovery

• Mapping an AI-Enhanced General Prototyping Capability

• Unlocking Operational Excellence: Building an Intelligent Process Optimisation capability

• Exploring a new age of AIOps to increase operational agility

• Competitive Intelligence as a Foundational Capability in the Programmable Organisation

• Risky Business: Harnessing AI for Smarter Risk Management

Six advanced management techniques for organisational change:

• Empowering Teams Through Continuous Improvement

• Empowering Your Team with Data: The Key to Agile and Effective Decision Making

• The Importance of Team Development Techniques in Agile, Small-team Structures

• What is Organisational Agility and What Can Leaders do to Cultivate it?

• Shifting from Output- to Outcome-Based Metrics for Agile Teams

• A Deep Dive on Achieving AI readiness in the Digital Workplace

Six deep-dive case studies of new ways of working:

• Lessons From an 'Old' Decentralised Organisation That is Well Placed for AI Success

• Lessons from Automattic: Embracing Remote Work and Fostering a Culture of Trust, Autonomy, and Innovation

• What can Toyota's Journey Teach us About Automation With a Human Touch?

• Lessons from Kyocera in integrating tradition with digital transformation

• Bridging AI & Physical Processes: How Unilever Embraced Digital Twins

• A Deep Dive Case Study of Enterprise AI in Action: Klarna’s Bold Bet on Automation

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