What is the cost to introduce new technology?

The cost of introducing new technology into the organization is high. It involves hiring new talent, training existing teams and building a new knowledge base. Depending on size and how close teams are working together, it increases or decreases costs.

Companies are often trying to do it with low cost and high effects. They fail. Not because of money or not enough time. They are not aware, what it means to introduce new technology. The world is all about AI now, years before about blockchain. People start calling it a necessary buzzword to sell better. Why? Because innovation is about improving business, society, or efficiency. How often it is a failure? I saw articles where 90% of startups are failing. They mostly introduce some innovation, which requires a lot of knowledge to push it further.

AI is an innovation to introduce into your company

Hype to use Large Language Models is in the peak. Everybody is thinking how to use it, to improve their efficiency, how to automate processes, how to get advantage of an AI. Language models are a part of machine learning. So to make the biggest steps, you need to introduce machine learning to your company.

How to introduce new technology?

Let’s dive deeper into understanding how to build new knowledge. In most cases, it’s all about people. Each person is having some skills. Some of them never heard about something, some of them are experts. So what do I need to have experts? Let people spend 10 000 hours on learning? It will be 5 year investment before they become masters in it. It seems like a huge cost. So what are the other ways?

I divide the process into four different stages. Each of them requires different time and money.

Internal training—cheap and long journey.

People say time is money. But what if you have a lot of time, but not much in your investment pocket right now? The cheapest way is to start internal training. It’s a really long process, where your teams are learning everything piece by piece, by themselves with a help of some courses, internet, and books.

This lets you train any number of employees in your company. Knowledge is spreading quicker and quicker as people learn. One of the problems is the knowledge is stuck within your environment. There is no validation from the outside.

Hire experts—quick and easy solution.

You don’t have time, and you need to act right now. Hiring some people seems like a good solution when you are in a hurry. They bring new knowledge, but they will be also a unique skill, which doesn’t exist in your current structure. It will still require learning to others how to apply new teammate skills.

External training—empower your team.

This is an excellent option to introduce new skills to your existing teams. It is a little faster than only internal training and also reduces bias which is created in siloed environments. I call it a middle option, when your teams have time, you need a lot of people to have new skills, and you don’t want to invest a lot of money upfront. It’s like one time investment connected with internal training.

Acquire a company—all in one solution.

This is the simplest way. Do you need knowledge, how to do something? Get a whole company with necessary skillset. This technique is often used by big companies, where they simply buy a smaller company.

What is the best way?

Depends on your company strategy. You need to answer a few questions:

How fast do we need new skills?
How much money we are able to spend?
How important it is for company growth?

Do you require skills fast? Hire people. Not much money? Internal and external training. Core mission for company growth? Buy a bunch of specialists – an entire company.

Sounds simple, but typically it is not. Even if something is a company key goal, you can’t have enough money to buy another company. In this case you need to hire, train and learn.

Sample journey I present in a series of articles here:

In Netguru I was responsible for introducing whole new tech stack – Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (in short KMM). This is almost 2 years journey, how mobile teams were learning new skills in multiplatform development using Kotlin.