Businesses need to move faster than ever - so how do you stay in control?

AI isn't just forcing businesses to adapt quickly. It’s also providing the very means to achieve that change. So how do you enable your employees to move faster and use AI tools to adapt faster, without losing control?

Automation and AI are empowering employees to drive change like never before, streamlining processes, uncovering efficiencies and driving innovation. But there is a crucial balance to strike.

Business leaders can benefit from this AI-fueled autonomy to boost everything from customer service to revenue, but they need to be wary that the other thing AI can accelerate is risk. It’s a balance between allowing workers to access the power of AI, while also maintaining controls and governance that ensure innovation and agility don’t come at a cost.

Traditionally, developing software was a long-winded and hands-off task, completed by specialists in a dedicated part of the business. By the time results were achieved, the needs of the business had often moved on. In recent years, low-code or no-code tools have given business users in departments such as marketing the power to automate their own processes.

And now, AI is turbocharging this process. In recent years, AI has become part of business processes, with agentic AI enabling AI to actually drive business processes and work collaboratively among human partners.

The AI factor

Automation tools have been around for a while, but when you introduce AI, more becomes possible. You can think of the options as being on a spectrum. At one end you have rule-driven automation with a human setting highly specific rules, followed strictly every time.

At the opposite end, AI agents simply respond to a big picture prompt and use the tools at their disposal to figure out how to take action. On one hand, strict rules can never be broken - but exceptions are hard to handle.

On the other, a lack of guardrails could yield unpredictable results. So business leaders need to think carefully about their risk appetite, and where they therefore set the autonomy dial.

For example, in the early stages of testing a new AI agent, a transportation company we work with found it had invented a refund policy which did not exist. Nobody wants an AI agent to start hurting the bottom line unnecessarily, so they hardened their process.

This is a healthy and necessary part of AI development. It’s about having a sliding lever. You can move back and forth on how much control you have on each part of a process. There will always be areas where more control is needed, and where a human should be brought in.

Avoiding the pitfalls

Once you have one use case working well, you naturally move on to another, and then another. The risk here is that complexity has a tendency to accumulate: with AI agents gaining more and more control, it can be hard to track the flow of data and decision-making in your business.

Was this decision human or automated? Which are the critical aspects of my infrastructure? Which people or systems are responsible for driving business goals? These are all fundamental questions that leaders need to answer as they deploy AI solutions at scale.

That’s why visual approaches to low-code and no-code are so important, helping leaders to visualize and understand their technology landscape in simple terms: it’s almost like playing an incredibly visual game such as Sim City, but with a real business. By allowing employees and managers to oversee AI processes as a simple, visual grid, business leaders can stay in control.

The right culture

Striking the balance between innovation and control requires business leaders to make the right choices about tools, but company culture is also extremely important. A common pitfall is to lead with the solution as opposed to identifying a problem and then solving it.

When leaders ask, “I heard about this new tech, how can I apply it?”, it’s much less likely to deliver results. Business leaders must ensure that employees have the right skill sets to really take advantage of automation and AI.

Emergent AI-powered ways of working like “vibe coding” can enable employees to draft a prototype really quickly, so it’s key to ensure people have the right skills, the right tools, and the right freedoms to experiment.

This way, leaders can encourage innovation amongst teams without compromising technology safety. The goal should be to create an environment that inspires people to own their own challenges and solve them, without fear.

The safe way to automate

Low and no-code approaches to automation are fundamentally changing the way businesses apply and use technology and paving the way for an AI-enabled world where business moves faster than ever before.

To get the most out of this technology, business leaders need to not only choose the right technology, with simple ways to visualize automations across the organization, but also ensure the right culture is in place.

Realizing the full benefits of AI and automation means giving more power to employees, so having the right skills and tools in place helps to mitigate risks and drive best practice. By finding calm among the chaos, business leaders can empower their organization to innovate fearlessly.

We've featured the best IT infrastructure management service.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro