Applications Of Data Analytics & AI For Your Business

It's a common theme in entrepreneurial discussion these days ... AI is coming for your jobs. 

The more nuanced statement is that AI isn't going to take your job - but someone using AI better might. 

Recently, Andrej Karpathy, ex-director of AI at Tesla and founding member of Open AI, posted a great tweet about how software engineering will be automated.  He compared it to automated driving. 

With automated driving:

1. first, the human performs all driving actions manually
2. then, the AI helps keep the lane
3. then, it slows for the car ahead
4. then, it also does lane changes and takes forks
5. then, it also stops at signs/lights and takes turns
6. eventually, you take a feature-complete solution and grind on the quality until you achieve full self-driving.

The progression is similar for software engineering (and, you guessed it, your business as well)

1. first, the human writes the code manually
2. then, GitHub Copilot autocompletes a few lines
3. then, ChatGPT writes chunks of code
4. then, you move to larger and larger code diffs
5. then, a tool starts coordinating other tools (a terminal, browser, code editor, etc.)

You get the point.  Human oversight begins to move towards increasingly higher levels of abstraction and management. 

If you think about it, this parallels a pretty generic path that a typical employee might take in your business.  A junior employee can't handle any ambiguity.  As they move up, a mid-level employee can probably handle some mild ambiguity ... they need to know where they're headed, but they don't need hand-holding on how to implement it.  A senior employee needs to know what problems they need to tackle, and then you get to entrepreneurs, and they don't even need to know what problems to tackle ... they'll find some. 

This suggests a pretty solid modus operandi for the coming years.  If you're worried about being replaceable, focus on higher-level behaviors. 

AI empowers businesses to do more with less.  Early adopters of AI will gain a significant competitive advantage by automating tasks, enhancing customer experiences with personalized recommendations, and making data-driven decisions that lead to cost savings and increased revenue.  Integrating AI into your business will propel your organization forward by unlocking new levels of efficiency, effectiveness, and certainty.  If you're steering the ship, you don't need to be as afraid of the waves. 

Here is a framework I created to identify the path to some not-so-easy wins that lead to sustainable business growth and progress: 

• Create Process Playbooks that leverage automation and AI to help businesses exceed standards both front-stage and backstage.  This class of solutions improves practical and business outcomes and helps avoid errors, omissions, and discretionary mistakes.
• Use Outcome Integrity Trackers to log decisions, actions, and results, hopefully improving and standardizing processes and outcomes.  This capability will evolve into the ability to measure the difference between skill and luck reliably and to the creation of accurate recommendation engines with real-time expectancy scoring.
• Capture, Calculate, and Curate Custom Metrics.  Much of what happens each day is lost.  Finding a way to save this data creates, expands, and augments a valuable new asset that is valuable itself, helps solve complex problems, and leads to new products, services, and solutions.
• Curate a Single Integrated Source of Trusted Data that is accurate, complete, and up-to-date.  Together, that data becomes the foundation for building new models, metrics, validations, certification, and compliance solutions.

Developing a Comprehensive AI Strategy is Crucial for Business Success

Businesses that don't adapt to changing landscapes fail. Having a roadmap, centered on what doesn't change is a reliable life support. Change doesn't have to be dramatic to be valuable. Just by taking these little steps and asking the right questions, you can make a big impact. I hope you're finding way to reap the rewards of these transformations, not just surviving them. 

Message me if you want to talk more about this.