Embracing the AI Mindset: A Path to Competitive Advantage

I just came out of a conversation with a Chief Data Scientist for a fairly large firm, and it is becoming clear that AI will keep improving by the day. He mentioned that they can now build models in days that took months, about a year ago.

It is just a matter of time before we will use AI to solve various problems. These include creating the next funny videos to improve cross-border collaboration through intelligent meeting summaries to predict business outcomes. But as with any big change, we must overcome several challenges. So the big question is, what can business leaders start doing today? I believe embracing an AI-First mindset can give you a significant advantage over your competition.

Embracing an AI mindset requires a willingness to experiment, learn, and invest in technology and talent to make AI a reality in your organization.

Embracing an AI-first mindset requires

• Appreciation of the immense opportunity
• Culture of experimentation - On the cultural side, hackathons, Innovation contests are a great way to build the culture. Get your business teams & data teams to build something together to work on their mindset.
• Right tools & methods with built-in explainability goes a long way in building trust.

AI mindset does not necessarily mean deploying AI at all costs. Rather, businesses should start by considering whether AI is the right technology to solve a particular problem. Rapid experimentation is key to determining whether AI is a viable solution; if not, businesses should not invest significant resources in it.

How do you decide what problems are worth solving using AI? Instead of asking, “Can we use AI to solve this problem?” a better question would be to ask, “How can we solve this problem?” and “Can AI uniquely solve this problem?”

Before adopting an AI solution, ensure enough and correct data to support it. AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on, so businesses must invest in collecting and analyzing data to ensure they have an accurate and complete picture of their operations.

Yes, we all know that AI is at the top of the tech hype cycle, so there is no rush to deploy AI.