How to Find Generative AI Opportunities in Your Organization

If you follow the news, you may feel as though your organization is the only one on the planet that hasn’t solved its problems with AI. However, many businesses are still finding their way. Case in point: the most recent Microsoft Work Trend Index report highlighted that only 24% of leaders reported rolling out AI to their entire organization.

At Velir, we counsel our clients interested in AI transformation to avoid the hype and focus on two fundamental strategies: preparing your data for AI consumption and identifying high-value use cases within reach. 

In this post, I'd like to share some tips on the second strategy: finding valuable generative AI (GenAI) use cases within reach. If you’re a leader feeling pressure to demonstrate AI progress for your organization, these tips will hopefully inspire action and help you avoid missteps. 

How to Find the Right Generative AI Use Cases

To identify the right generative AI use cases for your organization, focus on business value, seek ideas from diverse users, foster collaboration and experimentation, create self-imposed restraints, and keep your use cases user-centric. I’ll elaborate on each of these tips, so you understand why they’re helpful to your AI journey. 

Focus on Business Value and Avoid Novelty

It's easy to get excited by the latest AI capabilities and vendors. Still, positive transformation comes from aligning new ways of working to your core business principles, not the other way around. Ground your exploration in your organization's strategic pillars, how it generates revenue, and how it can mitigate costs or risks. Once you’ve traced and recorded those areas, you’ll be ready to apply new tools and ways of working.

Seek Ideas from a Diverse Set of Users

Your frontline employees, across all departments, are often closest to the daily pain points and inefficiencies that GenAI could alleviate. Create forums (surveys, ideation sessions, departmental huddles) where everyone feels empowered to contribute ideas, no matter how small they may seem. Ask questions like, "What tasks take up too much of your time?" or "Where do you see opportunities for smarter information access or content creation?"

Foster Peer Collaboration and Experimentation

Sometimes, people need to see what's possible to imagine how GenAI can apply to their work.

• Lightning Talks: Invite internal or external speakers to share concrete examples of GenAI in action to broaden understanding.
• Internal "Hack-a-thons" or Ideation Challenges: Create focused events where cross-functional teams can brainstorm and even prototype simple GenAI solutions for specific, pre-defined problems. This makes the technology less abstract and more tangible.
• Share Early Wins (and Learnings): If one team pilots a successful GenAI tool for a specific task, publicize that success internally to inspire others. 

Create Self-Imposed Constraints

Overwhelmed with the number of opportunities that exist? Imposing constraints can help narrow your focus. At Velir, we categorize GenAI use cases in the following ways:

• Internal-Facing vs. Customer-Facing: Are you looking to streamline internal operations (e.g., summarizing research, drafting internal communications, aiding HR processes) or enhance how you interact with customers (e.g., personalized marketing content, smarter chatbots, improved customer service)?
• Revenue-Generating vs. Efficiency-Focused: Will the use case directly contribute to new revenue streams, or is its primary benefit in cost savings, time reduction, and process optimization?
• Autonomous AI vs. Interactive AI: Is the goal for the AI to operate largely independently, or will it serve as a co-pilot, augmenting human capabilities by providing suggestions, drafts, or analysis that a person then reviews and acts on? For early-stage maturity, “interactive AI” often presents a lower barrier to entry and builds trust. 

Limiting your focus to one of these categories can help you decide which participants or business functions to include in your discovery process. 

Keep Your Use Cases User-Centric

Your initial ideation should focus on the problem and the desired outcome from a user's perspective. Assess the technical feasibility and specific AI models later. Your goal is to empower business users to think creatively about their needs, not weigh them down with technical considerations.

Ready to Find Your Winning Idea? Our Use Case Workshop Can Help 

If you're having trouble identifying GenAI use cases, Velir can help! We have a proven methodology that uncovers valuable use cases for GenAI assistance and automation.

Our GenAI Use Case Workshop provides your business with near-term and long-term opportunities for AI adoption that will improve operational efficiency and positively impact customer interactions. This activity is an important first step in adopting GenAI to transform your business. Through a series of structured activities, we identify use cases, prioritize them, and catalog risks along the way. 

The best use cases for AI adoption are often trapped in organizational silos and require collaborative, structured conversations to convert into actionable opportunities. By pairing your team’s experience with ours, Velir synthesizes the workshop outputs in a clear series of short-term, medium-term, and long-term GenAI opportunities.

Beyond this prioritization matrix, our workshop helps you develop:

• A use case catalog with descriptions and benefits
• A risk catalog with ideas for mitigation
• A high-level roadmap outlining potential phases for exploration and implementation 

These outputs serve as the building blocks for your organization's GenAI journey. If you’re ready to turn your AI potential into a plan, contact us today to get started.