By Sarah Nicastro, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Future of Field Service

In a recent podcast, Kenny Brown, the Senior Director of Global Surgical and Vision Care Franchise Business Technology at Alcon, shared the story of Alcon’s service overhaul. This journey was one that included the transition from viewing service as a cost-center to seeing its strategic value, an organizational restructuring to align to this new vision, global standardization centered around greater customer centricity, and the modernization of core technologies.

While Alcon’s achievements in this large-scale business transformation are impressive, the company’s journey is far from over. Like any organization with a mission to thrive in today’s world of nonstop change, Alcon is shifting gears to understand how best to navigate the next phases of digital transformation while maintaining its focus on customer experience and value. Kenny shares, “I’d love to say that the heavy lifting is behind us, but the next chapter is just going to be a different type of work than what we’ve done so far. As we move ahead, we rely on our three pillars to guide what we do: make the best products in the market, be the best service organization out there, and embrace cutting-edge digital innovation.”

4 Initial AI Use Cases to Level Up Service Innovation

Alcon’s next chapter centers around applying the power of AI to its successful service-centric business transformation. Kenny, who is leading Alcon’s GenAI Go-To-Market Strategy, is focusing first on practical use cases that demonstrate clear value to employees. The initial four areas Alcon is looking to leverage AI are:

1. Creating Smarter Customer Interactions. “We are aiming to personalize that touch,” Kenny explains. “We have a lot of data around our customers; I think GenAI can really help us to put that data to work. We have on what customers need, what their previous experiences have been, and so on, and GenAI will allow employees to tailor recommendations, offer more engaging experiences, and more.”
2. Moving Toward Proactive Service. “We don’t want to wait for a customer to call us and tell us their equipment is down,” says Kenny. “We know there’s an opportunity to look at issues before they pop up – to understand the trends that can create potential downtime. Sending data from our devices into a rules-based approach that feeds suggestions to the action takers, or even back into the equipment, can help us increase customer satisfaction.”
3. Automating Routine Tasks. “I’m not sure if this is GenAI or just traditional AI, but by automating routine tasks we free up teams to focus on more complex and high-value work,” says Kenny. “The engineer's least favorite thing about their job is entering in information into the service management system; let’s automate that task for them.”
4. Gaining Deeper Insights. “The fourth area is around using AI to create advanced analytics,” explains Kenny. “Using the intelligence to spot trends, optimize processes, and make smarter decisions as a business – faster.”

5 Areas of Focus for Effective AI Execution

To ensure Alcon achieves success in its incorporation of AI, Kenny is calling on his experience with the company’s global service transformation. Alcon has set its sights first on using GenAI within the business before taking it customer-facing. “The idea of our go-to-market at this point in time is for the enterprise; determining how we bring GenAI to life at Alcon,” says Kenny. “We have a lot of strong pilots and use cases that are already offering value. But, in a company of 25,000 people, we need to make sure the approach doesn’t feel fragmented.”

Here are Alcon’s five areas of focus for AI execution:

1. Governance. “On the AI journey, I think you have to start with governance,” urges Kenny. “Building that framework of governance clearly defines who is responsible for what, and ensures efforts are safe, ethical and aligned to our values. We have a dedicated AI team to oversee this and ensure they are the center of any innovation, building that framework and those parameters around what we do and what we don’t do.”
2. Start Small, Learn Fast. “We've had some pilot projects in very focused areas,” says Kenny. “We want to test those, learn from those, refine them, and build up scale from there. If we go tackle every single idea and problem that are out there, it won't build the experience enough to build advocacy and really get it going.”
3. Value Tracking. “We must ensure we track each of these use cases in a way that we can monitor our return on investment,” explains Kenny. “This is important to build excitement with our leadership, to continue to get investment in this space, and ultimately to return the value back to our business.”
4. Dedicated Ownership. In our podcast discussion, Kenny explained the creation of a role of an RPO (regional process owner) to own the transformation in each region of the business – he envisions something similar for AI. “We’re not there yet, but we could use the same RPO idea for GenAI,” says Kenny. “This helps to build the community of super users and create best practices in the regions.”  
5. Strong Communication. “We need a robust communication plan with regular updates, giving people tips and tricks, sharing what's coming,” says Kenny. “It’s important to keep everyone informed and engaged in a creative way, but it can also be overwhelming. We need it to be useful and relevant; effective communication is a big lever for us to focus on as we continue this journey.”

On the topic of communication, I asked Kenny if they’ve experienced any fear from employees of AI taking their jobs and, if so, how they’ve managed that. He explained that he echoes the sentiment of the quote, “GenAI won’t take your job, but those who know how to use GenAI will.” He believes its important to help employees see how the use cases can help them, train them on new functionality being introduced, and be open in your communication. “We’ve begun to see the guard coming down by addressing concerns and introducing use cases relevant to their roles,” says Kenny. “When you make it applicable to their life, suddenly they’re like – ‘OK, I’m in. I want some of that!’”