Salocin Group’s Alex Holt and Alex Keep sat down to discuss and explore how organisations are operationalising AI.
During the conversation, both Alexs uncovered powerful themes, which provide practical tips to help your organisation start incorporating AI in your operations. Read on (or listen!) to hear what they had to say…
Treat AI like a new team member
The pair began by talking about treating AI like a new hire, including the challenges that come with supporting and developing a junior or assistant member of staff, as well as expanding on the opportunities for its intelligent growth.
AI is still very much in beta – but if you treat it as an inexperienced assistant rather than an experienced senior consultant, it can already deliver enormous value.
Alex Holt
Strategic Consulting Director
Alex Holt explains, to get the best out of AI, you must set expectations early. Once this has been achieved, AI can become:
- An operations assistant for everyday administration
- A note-taker and information synthesiser
- A data formatter or content preparer
Fundamentally, these are simple, structured applications, which can save you hours of manual effort and improve workflow efficiency.
But although AI is already transforming productivity, replacing human intelligence is still far beyond its reach.
AI reminds us just how impressive our brains are – and how far we are from replacing them.
Alex Holt
Strategic Consulting Director
Don’t give AI full autonomy too soon
According to Alex Keep, most enterprise AI initiatives stumble because they try to give AI full autonomy too soon. The technology isn’t yet ready to act as an independent agent without human oversight.
To succeed, organisations must:
- Define narrow, specific use cases
- Establish robust guardrails and human approval points
- Test continuously to ensure reliability
Alex Keep warns that despite AI’s outputs appearing credible, they can contain subtle inaccuracies that only knowledgeable, subject matter experts would recognise. Meaning that, without the right checks, this could become costly to organisations.
During the discussion, Alex Keep shared an example from a project where content written in the English language was being translated into German. To non-German speakers, the output appeared accurate, but a closer review revealed it was a literal, word-for-word translation rather than a true reworking of natural, fluent German. Alex described it as “complete robot-powered copy.”
Alex Holt also shared an example where he and another AI expert had to persuade a team of salespeople that their AI assistant’s output was wrong, simply because it looked and sounded so convincing – AI often hallucinates.
He went on to note, “the Gen in GenAI stands for Generative, not General.” He explained that we’re not yet at a stage where AI can deliver reliable accuracy when asked to complete broad or undefined tasks. Underpinning the need for human oversight.
The better AI gets, the more dangerous it becomes – because it’s mistakes are harder to spot.
Alex Keep
Director of Business Operations
AI implementation relies on human expertise
A unified point from the discussion is that both Alexs agree plenty of human expertise is still required before fully implementing AI in your organisation. Although AI can automate manual processes, it still relies on people to define context, check accuracy and ensure content and outputs align with business objectives.
An effective AI programme will typically:
- Focus on high-impact, measurable outcomes
- Combine automation with expert oversight
- Deliver tangible efficiency without compromising quality
Ready to operationalise AI?
Press play to hear the full discussion between the two Alexs, to discover how organisations are beginning to operationalise AI and get organised for intelligence.
If you’re considering how to integrate AI in your systems and operations, enable your teams to confidently use it, or you need help turning AI’s potential into measurable progress and success – get in touch to explore how we can support you.
