Your AI Survival Guide

CHAPTER 1Overcoming the Inertia

“In a world that thrives on conformity, standing apart tests your resilience.” —Sol

I'm no Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. I'm not a Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) or even close to the geniuses who created neural networks or Watson and DeepMind. I'm not here to preach or prosecute on all the glories of artificial intelligence (AI), nor am I here to give you a technical dissertation on its intricacies. I'm not an academic or researcher, nor do I get paid to write code or promote vendors or tools.

I'm simply a practitioner who worked her way up through the corporate ladder—one who worked relentlessly with blind determination not knowing exactly where her career would go, one who eventually made it to the C-suite as the Chief Data Officer, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, and Chief Data and AI Officer for many Fortune 500s, one who accidentally fell into the world of data in the early 2000s and into artificial intelligence in 2011 when I helped IBM launch Watson.

I never thought that doing AI deployments, I would face so many unexpected challenges, but the reality is that you can take a licking along the way because transformations involve change, and well…people are generally averse to change. This is why I have the scraped knees, bruised elbows, and wounded pride from my experience in real-world deployments. Over the years I've tried multiple approaches, implemented numerous strategies, and have had countless alignment discussions ...