The AI Book

CHAPTER 5The Seven Deadly Sins of AI

By Luis Rodríguez¹

¹Chief Product and Innovation Officer, Strands

Quoting Andrew Ng (Co-founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University), “Artificial intelligence is the new electricity”. And just like electricity, AI has the power to transform every industry and it is already transforming financial services. However, the use of this new “electricity” does not come free from the risk of electrocution and other implementation difficulties. Just like any other technology, AI can be both beneficial and harmful. Whether you are already using AI or just thinking about it, you need to be aware of the potential pitfalls and, most importantly, plan a course to avert them by setting your organization on the right path towards a sound and ethical use of AI. Let us look at “the seven deadly sins of AI” that can stop us from reaching AI utopia, and how to best avoid them.

Data

There is no AI without data, and yet data availability is not as clear-cut a topic as it may seem. Organizations tend to have systems that aren’t designed to easily share data, or which are siloed, making it difficult to aggregate information across multiple sources. While big data technology is rapidly evolving to ease this pain, firms who are contending with data aggregation are already playing catch-up in the AI stakes. Data availability should always be front of mind when acquiring or designing IT systems, regardless of their genre. Secondly, ...