Reimagining Businesses with AI

CHAPTER 11Building the Right Technology Landscape

“Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.”

—Steve Jobs

INTRODUCTION

Those immortal words by the indomitable Steve Jobs could not be truer when it comes to building the right technology infrastructure for enabling AI.

On its own, AI is a very specific discipline of statistics to perform unconstrained analytics over large datasets to mimic cognitive capabilities. However, we know by now that exploiting AI for broader implications requires a different kind of institutional approach to technology foundation. We have to start right from where data is generated and acquired, how it flows through the various workflows and work-streams in an organization, how it is processed and managed, and how it is used. We have to think of AI initiatives in terms of integration into the business work processes of an organization extending all the way up to how users engage with the new insights, outcomes, and experiences. Many technology companies will promote their capabilities as the panacea for all problems, but that hypothesis hardly comes true because those solutions may not address the entire ecosystem issue. Doing something bespoke for every situation to address the breadth and depth of possibilities will become time consuming and expensive. In this chapter, we will help business and technology leaders think through the key aspects of the technology ecosystem and how to build the right technology foundation ...