Beyond the Noise: A Pragmatic view of AI

It is no secret that Artificial Intelligence (AI) today is on everyone's mind and feed. From the kitchen table to the classroom, and from the boardroom to Congress and social media, AI has enveloped almost every conversation and product. No technology or concept has taken over so much of the human mindshare, content, and discussion across the world as AI has in such a relatively short time. As I was cogitating on this over the past few weeks and months, here are a few perspectives through which I have come to understand this revolution—and how we can best employ it in our work and our lives.

Outcome-Based AI

The frenzy of AI has led to action before thought in most cases. "AI FOMO" is being driven top-down in many organizations with the hope that it will automatically lead to successful business outcomes. Instead, this FOMO often leads to distractions, taking critical company resources away from the organization's true vision. Companies are burning cash, only to realize that the overwhelming use of AI does not guarantee desired business results. Product companies are giving neglecting core products while over selling AI capabilites. Organization should realize that their businesses runs on core products and AI enhances them, AI does not automagically replace core products and functionality.

The most important aspect of leveraging AI is to use it to achieve a specific business outcome.Organizations have to be intentional, if there are no clear business outcomes to focus on, the effort in terms of human capital and AI spend becomes irrelevant or less effective. Organizations that can harness this power and provide an outcome-based vision to apply AI will be the ones that realize true value and find success.

The Spectrum of AI

• Personal Productivity : This is the basic level where you use AI to improve or accelerate your tasks and make yourself more efficient. There are hundreds of tools to help you with everyday activities like restaurant recommendations, vacation itineraries, home automation, driving directions, and drafting emails. AI at this level makes life more convenient and efficient.

  
  

• Amplified AI : This is where AI can be used to think on your behalf and give you ideas, improve your understanding, build project plans, or develop code. On a larger scale, this includes building self-driving cars, coding complex application modules, and creating intelligent systems. This level allows you to get to market faster, enhance your abilities, and accelerate both growth and development.

  
  

• Adventure AI : This is where we are discovering new drugs, identifying entirely new markets, running complex "what-if" scenarios, mapping diseases, and forecasting demographic changes. This is where the true, groundbreaking value of AI lies—when it leads us into the unknown.

  
  

The Cost of Innovation in the AI Era

Every product company today boasts of AI in their product. What is critical for organizations to understand is when to use what kind of AI products. There is no one-size-fits-all solution or mutually exclusive path. The key is to evaluate the options below and identify what fits where. We need to make sure we are calibrating the "cost of innovation"—which is defined as the value realized against the investment put into innovating products and services. Commoditized AI is best left to the vendors and using inherent AI capabilities in the product brings along innovation. On the other hand building AI capabilities that give competitive advantage is where you need to focus your internal efforts. Over time, economies of scale will make commoditized AI significantly cheaper, with better payment models.

• Out of the Box: Today, hardly any product is sold without AI built into it. We should leverage this built-in AI without developing it in house. There is no value in building this kind of commodity AI internally, as it is already part of the product offerings, and we surely cannot compete with the massive focus, effort and investment of these product companies.

  
  

• Enhance Using AI Toolkits: Standard platforms and applications are increasingly supporting AI developer toolkits alongside their built-in tools. This approach is the best of both worlds: it gives you built-in tools to use and build AI capabilities at speed, while also providing the flexibility to build additional capabilities or enhance out-of-the-box features for growth and business value.

  
  

• Build for Competitive Advantage: When you have a niche offering or captive market and there are no out-of-the-box tools available, or when existing platforms are too cumbersome, it makes sense to innovate and build using AI capabilities internally. Almost all major vendors are creating open frameworks that allow you to build and connect these tools to other enterprise systems or AI platforms. This competitive AI advantage will substantiate your market leadership.

  
  
  
  

Looking Ahead: AI’s Future Impact

Looking ahead, there will undoubtedly be a lot of churn before the dust settles. However, organizations that continue to focus on applying AI to drive core business outcomes and relentlessly serve their consumers with newly added AI capabilities are the ones that will successfully make the turn.