From Data To Profit

CHAPTER 13Discovering AI Treasure

Businesses have been promised treasure, but how do they find it? I often joke about a three-slide presentation companies use to sell AI. Slide 1 is all about AI and its potential. It's filled with stunning futuristic images.

Slide 2 is entirely blank.

Slide 3 is filled with massive numbers under the header “Profit.” That's what businesses are given to develop strategy with. There is a wealth of information about the potential for the technology to generate profits. There's next to nothing explaining how to go from slide 1 to slide 3. This book is slide 2.

Opportunity discovery is where initiatives should begin. When they don't, the business quickly loses faith in data science. There's no connection between business strategy and initiatives without an opportunity discovery process. With that gap in the process, data teams are set up to fail.

In too many businesses, data teams are traveling around trying to find work. They bring opportunities to the business, and the results are mixed. Our constant theme of staying close to the workflows is broken when the data team is the primary source of opportunity discovery. The data team is close only to the data science workflow. For the rest of the business and customers, they are outsiders.

Data teams have accessed so much data that they feel like domain experts after a while. However, most of that data has been gathered unintentionally. It isn't reflective of the workflows behind it. There isn't enough ...