Highlights
Reduced use case scoping and refinement time from weeks to days
Shortened model approval process from months to weeks
Processed and reviewed over 50 use cases in the first month
Achieved 100% improvementin AI solutions meeting internal standards
Streamlined auditing process for AI initiatives
Challenges
A leading manufacturing company established an AI center of excellence (COE) comprising an AI platform team and an AI governance team. Their goal was to create a comprehensive set of standards and policies for AI, build out an AI platform for efficient custom AI solution development, and run risk evaluations on AI use cases from across the organization.
They faced several challenges:
Coordinating between multiple stakeholders on the governance process
Ensuring adherence to AI standards and guidelines across all development initiatives
Managing stakeholder involvement throughout AI solution development and onboarding
Scaling the evaluation process for a growing influx of potential AI ideas
Lack of visibility into the status of AI initiatives and difficulty in auditing governed projects
Inefficient documentation using SharePoint and Excel, hindering scalability
The company had been meeting with the AI COE for months discussing potential solutions but had no way to operationalize these concepts. They were documenting everything in SharePoint and managing their use cases in Excel but found it incredibly challenging to scope and process everything at scale as they were receiving a significant influx of potential AI ideas that needed evaluation. They also could not quickly see the status of all their initiatives or easily audit what had been governed.
Solution
The manufacturing company turned to AlignAI and its AlignAI Hub to address these challenges. AlignAI provides an AI hub for enterprises to manage their AI use cases, establish and iterate on AI policies and standards, and catalog their AI solutions, whether they are building or buying them.
Key features ofthe AlignAI Hub that addressed the manufacturer's needs included:
AI Use Case Manager
This feature allowed the customer to register all of their use cases, scope them, and add business context. It enabled risk analysis to identify any conflicts with established processes and facilitated collaboration with business and operational stakeholders to verify and sign off on the details.
AI Solution Catalog and Checklist
This feature outlined all the requirements each solution needed to go through from design to development, testing, and deployment. The checklists were customized and pulled from the company's established standards, creating an easy way to audit solutions and check their status.
Playbook Studio
This tool allowed the company to reference or create guidelines and policies for AI, providing a central location for all standards and best practices.
Solution Pages
These pages stored solution documentation, results, and evidence based on governing guidelines. The company could produce this documentation through the AI capabilities in the AlignAI platform.
Risk Evaluation Assessment
This tool was used to assess all high-priority use cases and obtain approvals from the governance team.
Implementation Process
The manufacturing company deployed AlignAI Hub in just two weeks, rapidly integrating their existing AI policies, standards, and use cases while configuring the platform's governance framework, risk assessment processes, and executive dashboards to match their specific organizational needs.
The main solutions they wanted to focus on were their supplier delay model and their production visibility model. They also had several generative AI solutions for customer service routing and product support documentation. Additionally, they wanted to track their vendor-bought solutions to communicate to the broader organization all the AI tools available that they could request access to.
After mapping all of this out, AlignAI started connecting their information from SharePoint and Excel, where they were storing their policies, standards, and use cases. This process took two weeks to complete.
Results
The imple-mentation of AlignAI Hub yielded significant results for the manufacturing company:
Efficiency Gains
What previously took weeks to scope and refine a use case now took only days.
The model approval process was shortened from months to weeks.
Over 50 use cases were processed and reviewed in the first month.
Improved Governance
100% more AI solutions were meeting their internal AI standards.
The organization was able to run audits much faster with the AlignAI Hub by having everything centralized and standardized.
As they made iterations on their standards and policies over time, they could identify areas where existing solutions needed to be taken back through the process to be compliant.
Enhanced Compliance Oversight
The AI solution catalog highlighted areas where models had not gone through required processes to get the green light for production, including stakeholder review and sign-off of results.
Scalability
As their AI platform matured and was updated, they could release new functionality and operating procedures across several AI teams to move more towards a governed federated model and less centralized.
Stakeholder Collaboration
The AI use case tools allowed stakeholders to provide additional context about use cases, ensuring all details were available and properly formatted.
Months were saved in the scoping and approval processes between the AI platform team and the business and operational stakeholders.
The AlignAI Hub has allowed all of the stakeholders involved in our AI initiatives to make the appropriate hand-offs seamlessly, improving the quality of AI solutions we are building.
– VP of AI, Manufacturing Customer