Editorial
In conversations about new AI platforms and features, a common theme keeps surfacing — what one customer calls the “AI Buffet Syndrome.”
When you’re at a buffet, holding your plate in your hand, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the choices. What should you take? Do you try a little bit of everything? With so many options, how do you know which ones are the best?
That’s what we’re seeing with AI. Companies might have dozens of AI-based solutions throughout their organization — and hundreds of options from AI vendors — but no clear strategy on how to use AI to meet their business goals.
Table of Contents
- The Problem With the 'AI Buffet'
- Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
- An AI Guild Can Solve the AI Buffet Problem
- Where to Start
- Benefits of an AI Guild
- Skip the Buffet, Build Your AI Guild
The Problem With the 'AI Buffet'
With too many choices and no plan of attack, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the new AI tools and just keep adding new ones to your IT stack.
Unfortunately, this typically leads to confusion for employees, as they’re faced with multiple chatbots and other AI-driven platforms that each add complexity to their daily workflow.
When you don’t have an agreed-upon company-wide focus, efforts are duplicated throughout the organization, and sometimes even within each unit. Costs go up, employee satisfaction goes down and you never realize the full potential of AI.
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Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
If an employee has access to one or two AI chatbots, they probably know when and how to use them. But if you give them half a dozen (or more!) chatbots, you’re simply splitting their attention — and decreasing the chances they’ll use any of them productively.
As one of my customers recently observed, the most precious resource right now is someone’s attention. To earn your employees' attention, focus on the quality of AI tools — not the quantity.
Think of it this way: the best restaurants in the world don’t have a buffet. Instead, they curate a specific, high-quality experience. That’s how you should be thinking about your AI platforms. But how do you get there?
An AI Guild Can Solve the AI Buffet Problem
Chances are, your teams probably don’t even know what others are doing, especially if you work in an organization with thousands of employees. Is your customer success chatbot duplicating marketing efforts? Could HR’s tools inspire use cases? Simply finding the person in each department who’s actually responsible for new AI tools can be a challenge.
That’s why it’s so important to have an AI guild — a group of people throughout your organization who understand how you use AI, and actually talk to each other regularly. This cross-functional coalition answers the big-picture question: “What are we doing with AI, and how can we do it better?”
Where to Start
Ideally, your AI guild should include people who will represent their departments’ needs and who are excited to discuss project progress, share ideas and collaborate. You can choose people from specific roles, or use a brief screener to identify those genuinely interested in AI. Aim for a mix of technical and non-technical team members, and plan to meet at least twice a month.
Start by discussing what each department is trying to achieve, then see where you overlap. Then, once you know what tools you already have, you can focus on additional resources you need to procure and discuss whether to use an outside vendor or build them in-house.
We’re actually creating an AI guild at my company right now, and I’m looking forward to hearing new insights and recommendations from these “AI ambassadors.”
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Benefits of an AI Guild
Here are just a few of the ways an AI guild can serve your organization.
- A Clear Roadmap: People like to know where they’re going. Putting a team in charge fills a leadership gap and empowers a team to drive AI initiatives. Whether they’re rolling out new genAI internal communication tools or developing an AI agent launch kit, the AI guild can prioritize implementations and plan for a balance of quick AI wins (to build trust) and longer-term projects that need more time and resources.
- A Streamlined, More Flexible Tech Stack: If you have multiple AI tools that serve the same purpose, you’re wasting time and money. Your AI guild should have the big-picture view of organization-wide AI resources, so they can avoid redundant experimentation and identify platforms that can be pared back or even eliminated. For example, AI tools with integrated APIs may be able to replace other, less flexible options.
- Less Confusion (and Higher DEX Scores): Right-sizing your AI platform also helps remove confusion about which tool to use and when. When employees have a more straightforward path to productivity, you’ll likely see a rise in your digital employee experience (DEX) scores, which can lead to higher productivity and retention rates.
- Faster Implementation: One of the most time-consuming obstacles to deploying AI is the security review. While you shouldn’t cut corners on security, your AI guild can help speed things up by developing consistent, practical security standards for AI vendors and sharing them early so vendors can stay ahead without slowing you down.
- Upskilled Employees and Accelerated Adoption: In my last article about upskilling IT staff for AI, I noted that most employees feel unprepared for AI and want more training. An AI guild can help develop department-specific training to address the unique needs of each unit, and share best practices for training early-career versus experienced workers.
- Shared Success Stories and Best Practices: According to an MIT study, half of genAI budgets go toward marketing and sales initiatives, even though back-office automation typically offers a better ROI. (The same study also found that external partnerships reached deployment twice as often as internal builds.) An AI guild can track this type of research, use it to guide deployment and share internal success stories to celebrate AI wins.
- A Focus on Contextual Data: As AI platforms become increasingly commoditized, the differentiator will be high-quality data that provides context for the AI. The AI guild can develop a list of questions to clarify how each AI platform utilizes contextual data, which gives your organization a unique competitive advantage.
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Skip the Buffet, Build Your AI Guild
The “AI buffet” is only going to get bigger and more appetizing each quarter — which is why it’s crucial to have an AI guild in place sooner rather than later. Yes, it takes an ongoing commitment of time and resources. But delivering a more comprehensive and cohesive AI experience across your entire organization is well worth the investment.
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