Getting Control of AI Use Cases to Align Stakeholders

AI seems to make already-fraught stakeholder relationships even more fractious.

I’ve noticed a common trend emerging across different firms: everyone wants their own AI priorities and use cases funded first: Marketing for personalized campaigns, Sales for lead scoring, Risk for fraud detection, IT for copilots.

AI has become the new stakeholder battleground

It’s a familiar story: different teams, with different priorities. All vying for attention. The result is competing agendas, fragmented pilots, and slower progress. Each team’s initiatives are held up by the same traditional barriers: conflicting demands from the same subject matter expert, tech constraints, legal issues, budget competition.

The danger is your teams become more siloed. And as they co-operate less, you’re re-inventing the wheel and losing control of your strategy.

The remedy is to return to your traditional prioritisation discipline, but only after surfacing the key priorities and use cases in a structured, centralized manner.

Here’s how to do that using our 4-lens framework. I published this model a few months ago, and clients seem to be finding it useful. So I wanted to circle back to this with some further insights.

3 Tips to Get Control of your AI Priorities

1. Collate all AI uses cases you have by business function

You’ve already got a sense of use cases by business function as each team is wanting their own pet project funded. This way of looking at AI is through the lens of “Jobs To Be Done”.

Ask each function: What real problem does this solve? What is the likely business value?
This grounds the conversation in value rather than the shiny new new thing. For example, Marketing may be focused on generating leads, while Sales may be focused on customer conversion. You can now start prioritizing each by the impact they deliver.

2. Apply the Technology lens

Your Tech team may be already on to this. Ensure you’ve identified AI tools and AI technology types that will be useful to add to the mix. You may add initiatives that include investigating the use of particular industry specialist tech tools, or technologies such as sentiment analysis for example.

Where you uncover overlap or synergies, you can reduce duplication and spark a contender for a cross-functional initiative. Add these all to your list. And add the likely business value.

3. Consider organizational capabilities

You will need to build or buy (hire or rent) AI organisational capabilities.
This lens forces a capability audit. These are real distinct foundational initiatives you must include in order to support and enable your other priorities. Again, assign a business value to each.

When stakeholders see each idea identified through these lenses, you can then have a structured conversation. You can then start a prioritization process. I’ve used these type of approaches dozens of time, and each time my clients’ achieve executive and/or board alignment.

Your AI strategy then stops being a fight for resources, and becomes a shared roadmap for value.

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About Lisa Carlin

Lisa Carlin is a Strategy Execution Specialist. She works with business leaders to go from strategy to plan to result, in tough environments. Her clients love having her expertise and guidance to navigate their workplace culture and use AI to achieve success.

Lisa is author of the globally acclaimed newsletter, Turbocharge Weekly, read by 8,000 business leaders.

Lisa’s career includes roles at McKinsey and Accenture, then running her own business since 1999. Over this time she has delivered over 50 implementations with a 96% success rate.

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