Jack Shaw on Harnessing AI & Emerging Technologies to Drive Strategic Growth

Based in Manchester and deeply rooted in the city’s policy and research landscape, Jack Shaw plays a pivotal role in shaping regional economic strategy and devolution policy.

As a Policy Fellow at The Productivity Institute housed at the University of Manchester, AI expert Jack Shaw brings clarity and strategic insight to the debate around local growth, productivity, and public policy.

In this exclusive interview with The Motivational Speakers Agency, Jack Shaw shares how organisations can leverage emerging technologies—especially AI—for competitive advantage, the importance of a strategic rather than purely tactical approach to digital tools, and why continuous, dynamic planning must replace traditional annual strategy cycles.

Q: How can businesses utilise emerging technologies for a competitive advantage?

Jack Shaw: Well, AI is like, in some respects, AI is like any other technology and, in some other respects, it’s nearly unique — extraordinarily different from other technologies. So let me briefly address each of those.

I’ve been working with emerging technologies my entire career, ever since the 1980s, and to some respect actually even a little bit before that, back to when I was first in graduate school. One of the things that’s important for businesses to understand is that it’s not about the technology.

Utilising technology or saying that you have a particular kind of technology, such as AI, in use at your organisation is not immediately going to provide you with strategic benefits, competitive advantages and so forth. You have to think about how utilising any technology — or, even better, combinations of technologies — can enable you to do business in different and better ways than what you’ve been doing before.

I think the key point in this is what’s called digital transformation. A lot of people are under the misimpression that digital transformation simply means we’re getting rid of paper, but all too often their interpretation of that simply means: if we take all of our processes and systems that used to use paper (or, in some cases, are still using paper) and we make the entry of the data and the information digital on computers or smartphones, and then we store that information digitally and retrieve it that way, well then we’ve accomplished digital transformation.

All you’ve really accomplished in that case is that you get some of the smaller marginal benefits of getting rid of paper — eliminating things like transcription errors, some of the delays of conveying information via paper — but you haven’t really rethought the way that your organisation works.

When I refer to a business, I’m really talking about any type of organisation — whether it’s a private sector business in any industry (manufacturing, distribution, retail, energy, what have you) or whether it’s a public sector organisation, like governmental agencies at the local or national level, or quasi in-between organisations like healthcare.

Depending on which country you’re in, the government and healthcare may be more or less closely aligned with how they work with each other. I will refer on occasion to organisations or enterprises, and much more frequently to businesses in terms of how they use these technologies, but I’m really referring to all of them.

The opportunity for businesses to utilise AI is to help them think about how to leverage AI to dramatically improve their business processes.

Q: How can businesses effectively leverage AI?

Jack Shaw: There are a lot of people out there who are very good at explaining the technical details of how these tools work. Often, though, they aren’t looking at the big picture of how you use these tools.

Most of the usage of these generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and Claude, is tactical in nature. Now, that’s not bad. By tactical, what I mean is: it’s being used by individuals such as yourself and myself to improve the quality and productivity of the work they’re doing.

That’s a great thing — we’d all like to be more productive, and the organisations we work with would all like us to be more productive.

Sometimes these tools can be used by small teams working together. One of the challenges in many organisations is that, as you look across the organisation as a whole, they tend to use these tactical applications of generative AI tactically.

In other words, they don’t have a strategic plan for how they are going to adopt this across the organisation as a whole and make sure that across all of their teams and people in the organisation, they are maximising the quality and productivity of their work by taking advantage of these tools.

All too often, the approach they take is: “Here’s a few guidelines and rules as to how to use it, like please don’t take all the company’s detailed financial reports and upload them into the generative AI tool, because some of that information could end up turning up in somebody else’s research.” Aside from those kinds of guidelines, it’s often left to individuals to figure out whether, how, and when they want to use it.

The smarter organisations are taking a strategic approach to how they use tactical AI — that is, AI to maximise the quality and productivity of individuals’ work and the work of small teams coordinating together — and they put plans in place to train people and coordinate their utilisation of these tools and technologies across the enterprise as a whole.

If organisations are going to be using these tools — and pretty much everyone has already started using them and will need to use them to compete — they must ensure adoption is well thought through and strategic.

Every single organisation out there needs to have a strategic plan in place, ideally by the end of the first quarter of 2025, for how they are going to adopt generative AI tools to maximise the productivity and quality of work across the organisation.

Even for those organisations that are using generative AI as a tactical tool, implementing it in a strategic way is not the same as using strategic AI. Strategic AI is when you are using AI to help you rethink the way that mission-critical processes and systems work across the organisation as a whole.

For example, if you’re a large manufacturer using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like SAP or Oracle, you can’t just add a subscription to ChatGPT and expect it to transform your operations.

You have to rethink the way these systems work, incorporating other forms of AI like predictive analytics, machine learning, and knowledge-based expert systems, along with emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, blockchain, extended reality (VR/AR), and 3D printing.

Organisations need a long-term digital transformation strategy, executed over one, two, three, five or more years, to redesign not only processes but, potentially, their entire business model for delivering value.

This exclusive interview with Jack Shaw was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.