If you’re involved in a major change or transformation at work focused on adopting new AI technologies, this is an important perspective to be aware of. I’m researching this subject for a new trend report (Future of HumAIn Work) and work in this area (disclosure) and in my experience, this perspective or mindset and getting it right at the outset, will shape your success.

There are two ways you can approach an AI Transformation. Simply put, it’s to view it either as a destination or a journey. At a more specific level, I have touched on this before and broken it down into these two approaches: Project versus product management in AI Transformation.

I created a simple visual and description to explain the differences a little for this post:

As you can see from the visual mechanism, it is a perspective thing. When you step back and look at efforts beyond the short, fixed term, then you see the cyclical or iterative nature of the journey.

In this video where I covered other perspectives, I touched on this longer-term, iterative approach in a separate visual: Future of HumAIn Work – Human Centric AI Transformation. Here is the visual below. This is what a good transformation strategy looks like and it starts with taking the right path based on a choice on how you view things. In other words, the perspective you bring.

There might be other views or perspectives than the two I have contrasted, but I think on the whole, these two are often what they boil down to.

I clearly favour the journey or product management view/perspective. I liken it to how you would manage a SaaS product that is evergreen, always changing and needing to be supported on that basis. So too with a major transformation.

You could get deeply technical about this. I did that to some extent in the post on project versus product management. But I like the simplicity and zen-ness of the levels in this post. I’ll leave it at that for now.