Digital transformation has been a long-simmering goal for organizations that want to take advantage of new technologies to streamline their operations. But that process has often run into hurdles that have derailed those specific efforts, or worse, sidetracked an organization’s overall business continuity.

One of the biggest challenges in digital transformation efforts has been in training talent to take advantage of new business opportunities. This is most often found in legacy organizations barreling toward their digital future like telecom operators and networking companies.

Adding fuel to this challenge are issues around the dynamic swing in employment needs tied to the pandemic and the growing focus on new artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like generative AI that have further impacted employee morale.

Gartner this week released a report that found only 31% of employees said they are “engaged, enthusiastic and energized by their work.”

“Despite organizations making investments in engaging their employees, our research shows that almost 70% don’t feel as engaged as they should be and aren’t feeling a meaningful connection to their job,” Keyia Burton, senior principal in Gartner’s HR practice, wrote. “Figuring out how to actually impact employee engagement is a huge priority because it has a significant impact on several key business outcomes.”

Randstad Digital is one of those firms that attempts to help enterprises on this journey. The firm is an offshoot of Randstad, which is one of the world’s largest staffing firms, with the digital arm being cited as a leader in providing talent and strategic services.

Venu Lambu, CEO of Randstad Digital, laid out three significant challenges he is seeing today as organizations move toward their digital transformation goals.

Lambu explained that many organizations have implemented the first phase of their digital transformation plan by “making the process efficient,” but that they are now challenged by using digital technologies to evolve their business models. This includes having a strategic intent toward talent.

“When we look at that heavy lifting of digital transformation, you don't want to essentially create two worlds within an enterprise, as I call them: an old world and a new world,” Lambu said. “It's about how do you actually take the existing teams along with you in the journey. That means the investment that we need to make today for the talent development and investments we need to make on the skilling program for the existing teams while you integrate the next-generation talent based on different technology domains.”

This challenge is further exacerbated by a lack of what Lambu calls “business sponsorship” within an organization. This involves having digital transformation goals that are tied to actual business success.

“Most of the digital transformation these days are either owned or driven or enabled by business,” Lambu said. “It's extremely important that the KPIs for defining the success of the business has to be defined very clearly, otherwise it could just end up becoming a very prolonged technical or a technology-centric project.”

While these first two issues have some history, the recent hype around generative AI has added significantly toward the team challenge of digital transformations.

Lambu sees AI as being a huge benefit for digital transformation goals, but organizations are still struggling with how to position that opportunity within an active business environment. He explained that the key is to position AI as a wider benefit to an organization that can then gain wider team involvement toward building new use cases.

“If you position AI as either a threat to a job or threat to somebody's inefficiency or as a threat to the future career progression, you don't get the overall ability to multiply the impact of multiple use cases so that you can build AI at scale. You instead get frustration,” Lambu said. “Change management is extremely important when any new technology comes into the enterprise.”

This AI-related challenge was highlighted by a recent report from consulting firm Information Services Group (ISG), which noted increased use of generative AI has swung talent acquisition power back to the employer.

“2023 has been the year of widespread worry about the ‘AI-apocalypse,’” Ola Chowning, partner and digital lead for ISG North Europe, wrote in the report. “The potential implications of generative AI, the growing maturity of the DevOps skills market and the willingness of employers to source cost-effective digital talent from new geographies like Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Vietnam, have put additional strain on an already nervous talent market.”

AT&T, for example, has touted its use of generating AI in helping its customer service team better help subscribers. This includes the development of its “Ask AT&T” tool that allows those teams to interact using natural language with back-office systems to more quickly help customers.

However, AT&T Chief Data Officer Andy Markus added that “we’re staying flexible as this nascent technology matures.”

Lambu said this flexibility is important in the near term as AI works through the inevitable hype cycle. This is especially important for defining the real intent and need for AI within an organization.

“When you get onto the ground, when the rubber hits the road, when you start defining the scope, that's where the hard questions need to be answered,” Lambu said.

Luckily, some of those questions can be informed by learning from past integration of automation systems. Lambu noted that many of these systems initially had similar hard questions around the depth in which those systems can and should be used as well as their impact on workflow.

“It took some time for automation to get into that positive spin, positive narrative and a lot of enterprises benefited hugely in the early stages of it,” Lambu said. “I do believe that anything that you can build AI use cases with while keeping the customer at the center and build use cases around that customer, you will see huge inclusiveness within enterprises, whether you're building a use case for the finance organization, use case for the sales organization, distribution or even the manufacturing or shop floor. If you can relate to what it means to the customer, the end customer who's buying your product or services, I think you will see the acceptance.”