Understanding AI - Part 2

Learnings from Module 2 of the online AI program from MIT - Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy:

My favourite learning is number 15.

1. Machine learning has now come to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, and it can be used in many ways in business, including sensing, predicting and generating.

2. What the machine learning is all about is finding underlying patterns in big amounts of data, which turns out to be a very useful thing because sometimes it finds patterns that humans might have never noticed before.

3. What Computers may well be able to do far better than people:

They are already much better than we are at arithmetic and have been for decades, but now with these new machine learning techniques, computers are increasingly able to see patterns in vast amounts of data that we humans would never have been able to notice, but may well be very important.

4. If you can anticipate a way of using artificial intelligence to do something better than your competitors, or faster, or cheaper, but better in some way or maybe even do something that your competitors never even thought of doing, that’s a very interesting strategic possibility.

5. Companies who have big amounts of data … have a big strategic advantage over those who don’t.

6. Advice to entrepreneurs is to focus on solving fundamental customer problems rather than merely implementing AI. 

7. For existing businesses, decisions should be based on value propositions and return on investment.

8. One very important thing for any company is you have to be positioned in a way that the technology can be adopted by the users where they can generate the value out of it.

9. The benefit of the AI ... is it does things faster, better, cheaper more accurately.

10. AI will help make do more high-quality work at lower cost.

11. The most important thing when starting an AI company is to really be solving an important unmet problem for your customers. That is 100 times infinitely more important than whether AI is or is not a part of the solution.

What's important - Really understanding the problems, really understanding why current technology, much of which today will be starting to incorporate AI, is unable to solve that and why your solution is going to be so much better than what’s currently out there that people will switch from what they are currently doing and begin adopting your technology, and how will that grow over time?

12. Start from the business fundamentals, and AI may or may not be useful here. There is a lot of interest, a lot of buzz around AI. It’s not obvious that following that is even the best strategic move. 

It may be being the non-AI which is the best strategic move. 

Everyone’s going to be looking with an AI lens about what problems can be solved with AI. Certain problems that can’t be solved with AI might actually be the new places for industry leading businesses because they are probably less crowded. Really understand the competitive landscape, the problems your customers have and not simply jumping to AI being the solution.

13. An AI will be the most disruptive part of your business because so many people are working on it. There are so many dollars already been thrown at it. They are so many great tools being released by very large tech companies that sometimes it’s going to be the customer relationships, customer integrations that are far more defensible overtime.

14. You should be judging the product on its merits and the solution on its merits. Don’t be unduly fed by feeling that you need to use AI to stay ahead. This field will continue moving. Continue getting better, just being very objective and understanding what is your value proposition, what is the return on investment, when will the timing be correct.

Don’t make this mistake of thinking if we can’t do it today, it won’t be doing it in three years because sometimes you need to get ahead of it. 

15. Don’t focus on the AI, focus on the actual solution and how it is generating value for your customers.

16. Don’t use AI just because it’s cool. Use it because it’s actually useful either now or in the foreseeable future.

17. People aren’t going to lose their jobs to AI. People are going to lose their jobs to people who use AI.

Keep learning, implementing and contributing to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜

Loving you,
j.