Operationalizing AI

Chapter 5. AI Center of Excellence

One of the objectives of operationalizing AI should be to establish an AI Center of Excellence within your organization. At the core of a CoE is the concept of an AI Factory.

Key Terms

AI Factory

A metaphor for how an organization moves beyond the “lab” stage of experimentation and AI prototypes into more sustained coordination of people, processes, and platforms that function efficiently, akin to a physical factory

AI Center of Excellence (CoE)

Integrating the core “factory” with the other supporting departments so that they can provide long-term support as the end goal for operationalizing AI

Let’s pull together several core concepts we’ve covered so far in this report and explore how to operationalize AI as a “factory”—as a structured approach for producing AI solutions for your line-of-business use cases—then integrate the factory with other supporting departments to establish a CoE.

The AI Factory Concept

To put AI into operation or use within an organization, it’s helpful to use a factory metaphor. In this section, we’ll cover the components of such a factory, which include a road map to help coordinate policy across your people, process, and platform.¹

If we were to go back to early data science teams from a decade ago, the notion of running experiments was a relatively novel approach. Curiosity and experimentation have been key characteristics of the most successful data science teams. Even so, the nature of experimentation ...