Driving Digital
Transformation with
Generative AI: A CIO’s
Checklist

Generative AI is a massive breakthrough for industry leaders as it can redefine how they work. We all noticed that Generative AI unlocks transformative potential for every business function.

Implementing such technology for your business functions, let’s say, employee support, may require more than technical knowledge.

You will rethink and transform your old employee support model with the GenAI chatbot. It is not an easy job. People, processes, technology, and work culture are all involved in a digital transformation project.

Hence, GenAI-driven digital transformation for employee support can take a more strategic approach, removing challenges and driving organization-wide success.

In this article, we’ll learn the CIO’s checklist for driving digital transformation with GenAI.

Why consider digital transformation with GenAI

Generative AI has the potential to create high-value work for employee support. It can efficiently redefine how a service desk operates.

Rethinking GenAI to replace the old medium of service desk tools has its benefits. Eventually, this can ensure better ROI and maximize resources to help you save money and gain a competitive advantage.

Below are some reasons for GenAI-driven digital transformation:

CIO’s checklist for digital transformation with Generative AI
  • Enabling self-service:

Legacy service desk tools offer self-service. But, the existing friction can impact user experience. GenAI can create new content, learn from experience, generate custom answers, and adapt to a new situation to deliver more enriching responses and problem resolutions.

  • Enabling self-service:

Legacy service desk tools offer self-service. But, the existing friction can impact user experience. GenAI can create new content, learn from experience, generate custom answers, and adapt to a new situation to deliver more enriching responses and problem resolutions.

  • Personalized engagement

GenAI-based employee support can understand user intent and entities to establish a relationship with an input. By applying semantic search, GenAI can easily empathize with a user and provide personalized responses to solve a problem. It certainly increases user adoption and reduces ticket volumes.

  • Simplifying processes

When combined with GenAI, existing work processes can become quite simple. In service desk scenarios, the GenAI chatbot can help automate mundane processes, streamline workflows, and free up agents' time to focus on critical service desk inquiries.

Digital transformation, indeed, helps battle present challenges in employee support. GenAI fits your needs.

Digital transformation is inevitable for competitiveness because your competitors are not sitting idle.

In this digital-first world, GenAI is a must-have, not nice-to-have.

Here is our checklist for ultimate success.

Checklist: Creating effective GenAI strategies for digital transformation

We segregate our checklist into key segments:

  • 1. Pre-launch consideration
  • 2. Go-live consideration
  • 3. Post-launch consideration

This segregation helps you stick to your approach, follow the checklist, and drive maximum value.

CIO’s checklist for digital transformation strategies with Generative AI

Pre-launch considerations:

A CIO’s checklist for pre-launch activities can help you make the right iterations and avoid mistakes before implementing GenAI in the live environment.

Follow them below:

  • Set the vision and goal

It’s about the outcome. For example, you can aim to create an omnichannel employee experience so everyone can participate and do their best work.

On the other hand, the goal is to make it easy to solve as many service desk problems autonomously as possible and reduce downtime.

  • Get stakeholder buy-in

A digital transformation initiative is not a piecemeal project. It is an organization-wide initiative. Bring everyone on the same boat who you think their support and commitment is integral to your project. It can be service desk managers, IT leaders, agents, HR teams, IT teams, CTOs, etc.

  • Identify possible use cases

Study existing workflows and discover how they fail to resolve common problems. You can redefine them or create new use cases. For example, if password reset has only a one-step workflow, you can create multi-step workflows for scenarios such as “old password not working,” “error login,” or ”get help,” etc.

  • Select your genAI models effectively
CIO’s checklist for digital transformation with Generative AI: various genAI models

GenAI model selection can be overwhelming. Vendor options are wide in the market. Choose the vendor that efficiently promises to solve your needs and meets your budget.

Depending on your needs and resources, you can find three options—

1. Private model or custom GPT model

Choose a custom GPT or private GPT bot to control your proprietary data and leverage custom solutions for business use cases.

2. Ready-to-use GenAI

If the public version of the GenAI model or chatbot easily solves your business-specific problems, an off-the-shelf tool can work.

3. Pre-trained model or GenAI bot

Get a ready-made model and retrain it for some specific use cases without touching its core model structure.

Depending on your business needs, you can choose one that fits your organization’s needs, including your budget, while helping you offer custom solutions.

Workativ is likely a better option for helping you build a custom ChatGPT solution without all the in-house hassles. To learn more, schedule a demo.

Talk to your peers to improve

Learn about your peers' projects. Learn what works best for them and what does not. This is highly effective in avoiding mistakes and maximizing your initiative efficiently.

Excavate business data for unknown opportunities and ensure improvements

Data may be scattered around. Carefully harness it. Look for hidden trends and turn them into use cases for service desk improvements.

For example, check if your service desk receives more desktop assistance queries than others. If so, you can pick them for use cases.

Begin with a pilot test

Don’t hurry to launch a full-scale rollout. Be patient and implement GenAI use cases in a controlled environment. Gather feedback and look for potential threats from pilot tests. Fix the problems and correct the system.

Create a feedback loop

Ensure you gather feedback and update AI systems to align them with real-world needs. Also, regular feedback helps keep your AI systems relevant and effective.

Develop a frequent audit trail for GenAI models

A frequent audit trail is always better than no audit trail to identify potential bias or misinformation and identify opportunities to fine-tune GenAI data. It helps you improve model accuracy and relevancy and keep up with market trends.

Build safety guardrails for GenAI

AI must deliver accurate responses that can empower rather than create nuances. Always ensure human oversight while GenAI delivers answers, especially while helping make critical decisions.

Go-live considerations

You have completed your pilot tests, AI audit trails, and others. Now, you can be ready for the full-phase rollout of the GenAI implementation and head towards digital transformation.

The Go-live considerations are critical to ensuring project success, as user adoption matters.

Reduce knowledge gap

Users like the productivity boost GenAI offers. However, they also fear biased output and a threat to job security, which could impede user adoption and organization-wide digital transformation.

You can prepare resources to discuss the use cases and benefits of GenAI. Also, organize workshops to clear doubts and enable them to adopt GenAI tools as an early adopter.

Communicate launch day

Once your GenAI tool is completely ready for launch, you will set off to a big start. Announce the date of launch and prepare your people for a comfortable journey.

Deploy a Generative AI solution

GenAI can call APIs to provide you with custom services. You can deploy your GenAI-powered solutions to chat interfaces like MS Teams or Slack—where your people stay.

SaaS-based solution provider Workativ enables you to build a GenAI chatbot for your service desk and integrate it with your MS Teams or Slack for speedier adoption.

Implement workflows

After you deploy a GenAI bot, implement workflows to automate mundane tasks and improve productivity and efficiency. Simultaneously, you can tweak existing workflows and add them to service desk operations.

Build a robust communication strategy

Your people must have a platform or tool to raise their concerns or ask questions while using the GenAI chatbot for service desks.

You must also send newsletters and other communication materials that educate everyone about GenAI and keep them updated.

Implement feedback mechanism

A feedback loop helps you collect people's views and opinions about GenAI solutions or platforms. You can create a feedback form, set a cadence, and collect feedback to work on the improvements.

For example, when someone complains that ticket creation does not work, you can work to fix the bug and ensure a smooth user experience.

Set certain benchmarks and celebrate milestones

You can set small benchmarks for your initiative's success. For example, try to hit 100 weekly tickets with GenAI automation. When you achieve this milestone, celebrate it and encourage a positive environment for everyone.

Optimize Your IT Service Management with AI.

Post-launch considerations

It is never over right after you launch your GenAI solution. Your responsibility doubles as managing so many components becomes critical. Note that most projects fail due to a lack of attention and careful iteration.

Monitor progress

Keep a constant watch on how GenAI augments your service desk operations. You can capture chatbot data and analyze the number of calls, self-service efficiency, tickets deflected, unresolved tickets, etc.

Also, note the technical aspects of a platform. For example, check if self-service pulls the right information from embedded knowledge articles and offers consolidated information. If anything works differently, you can work.

Test and debug

Errors in login, the wrong chat window, options not appearing, etc., can impede user experience. More such bug issues can be reported. Keep a watch and fix them as they arrive. A negative user experience can impact adoption and digital transformation initiatives if not done on time.

Promote change management

Introducing any new change can create chaos, which leads people to oppose it. Educate your people about the new technology and its benefits for productivity and efficiency. The right guidance can help your people embrace change.

Train your people on the responsible use of GenAI

Generative AI can produce anything using its training data. Users can apply prompts and manipulate them to generate some unlawful data. Train your people to use it responsibly and refrain from causing harm to others.

Implement a human-in-the-loop system

Put a continuous monitoring system or human oversight in place to ensure your GenAI platform produces the right information and does not mislead anyone. If anything goes wrong, prompt action is required to minimize the impact.

Adhere to global and regional regulatory needs

Strict regulatory compliance is mandatory to promote the safe use of GenAI solutions. Companies are barred from storing and using personally identifiable information to train their tools and augment GenAI performance.

It is a must for you to maintain compliance with regulatory needs.

Maintain transparency in AI applications

GenAI can do many things, but only within the limits of what it is trained in. As much data as you use, you can expect performance only up to that. Tell your people what you can achieve with your tool and what not. It helps you keep everyone aligned and attain your objective.

After researching 5 different chatbot solutions, we decided to go ahead with Workativ for its’ easy integration with systems that we use internally at GoTo.

Gabriel Grecco

Global Manager - IT Service Desk

Read GoTo Case Study →

Partner with Workativ to drive digital transformation success with GenAI

Generative AI is evolving fast and unlocking more and more possibilities for every vertical.

From the service desk perspective, a Generative AI chatbot can unleash many applications that can transform existing work modes.

CIO’s checklist for digital transformation with Generative AI

You can change the way your people work with service desks in the following manner—

1. Self-service

Users can find information quickly and apply it to gain auto-resolutions without any human intervention

2. Agent-handover

If no answer is found, the agent handover quickly comes in to help address critical issues.

3. Knowledge sharing

The GenAI service desk allows agents to instantly use embedded knowledge to understand an issue in its full context and solve problems in real-time. They can also ask fellow members to share knowledge articles and stay informed.

4. Instant reply

AI suggestions effectively reduce the time that agents would otherwise need to think, craft a response, and eventually delay a reply.

5. AI summary

Even a new agent can learn how to create a summary of service desk requests and communicate it to stakeholders. AI summary helps produce a summary without much effort.

Digital transformation with Generative AI certainly keeps your business ahead of the competition and brings massive benefits.

Workativ can intricately fulfill your digital transformation ambitions with Generative AI by allowing you to leverage a conversational AI platform built with LLM properties or GenAI.

Workativ enables you to apply all the features mentioned above and change the existing nature of work in your service desk while allowing you to augment productivity and efficiency and boost user experience.

Getting started with Workativ is easy. Its no-code chatbot platform offers custom workflows, GenAI applications, integrations, and faster user adoption.

CIO’s checklist for digital transformation with Generative AI

When you follow the CIO’s checklist for digital transformation with Generative AI, Workativ gives the best results.

The benefits of Workativ are mentioned below—

1. Rapid user adoption

The CIO’s checklist demands rapid user adoption. MS Teams or Slack integrations give users a familiar experience of interacting with fellow members. Workativ requires no prior training or guidance while making users comfortable using the GenAI chatbot.

2. Continuous testing and debugging

Uninterrupted user experience is Workativ’s utmost priority. Continuous monitoring is performed on the system side, and instant bug fixes are applied to minimize downtime. Besides, we undergo stringent functionality tests, performance tests, stability tests, and UX tests before being certified to go live.

3. Workflow implementation

Workativ requires a zero-learning curve to implement workflow automation. When you upload knowledge articles, the GenAI chatbot turns them into ChatGPT-like conversations for user queries. Thus, you gain the flexibility of automated conversations or workflows.

4. Robust security features

Workativ follows GDPR, CIPPA, and other regulatory rules to facilitate companies' robust security needs. Besides, E2E, MFA, SSL encryption, Malware, and Spam protection are in place to ensure users' strict data privacy. Workativ ensures security on its side.

There are more things that Workativ can handle to help you transition to digital transformation with Generative AI efficiently.

See Workativ in action for yourself. Try our free bot.

If you learn more about the GenAI chatbot for your service desk digital transformation, book a demo today.

FAQs

1. How can GenAI help with digital transformation?

GenAI develops inherent abilities to respond, create, and perform tasks in a human-like way using billions of training data. In a service desk context, the GenAI chatbot can help change how a service desk works. It helps automate tasks, personalized user experience, and frees up agents to handle critical tasks.

2. How can you get started with digital transformation for service desks with GenAI?

You can follow a useful CIO checklist to get started with digital transformation. Some of the critical checklists include,

  • Set your goals: What do you want to achieve with GenAI digital transformation for your service desks?
  • Discover use cases: What service desk tasks do you want to automate?
  • Choose a GenAI model: Choose from custom, off-the-shelf, and fine-tuned GenAI solutions to meet your needs.
  • Start with a pilot test: Start small, collect feedback, and make improvements before a full-phase rollout.

3. What are some challenges you should consider for successful digital transformation with GenAI?

  • User adoption: Users may resist new changes. To avoid resistance, educate your people about GenAI and its benefits for service desk use cases.
  • Data bias: GenAI can hallucinate due to a lack of sufficient data. Keep monitoring and retraining your model to prevent inaccuracy and misinformation.
  • Human oversight: Keep humans in the loop system to monitor discrepancies and ensure accuracy.

4. How can Workativ help with digital transformation with GenAI for service desks?

Workativ is a no-code platform with a user-friendly interface that allows you to build a chatbot and create GenAI-powered workflows for service desks. It offers robust security features and integrations for MS Teams and Slack for rapid user adoption.

Auto-resolve 60% of Your Employee Queries With Generative AI Chatbot & Automation.

Deepa Majumder

Content Writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.