Preface

Many AI projects are in progress today, and many of them will fail. This book will help you avoid starting an AI project that’s doomed to failure and will guide you toward the projects that can succeed.

I wrote this book to help you get concrete business results, and to help you influence how AI is used in industry today. Current discussions about AI focus on algorithms and case studies of successful applications. What’s lost in this discussion is the human element of AI. We see algorithms, and we know what large organizations have done with them, but what we don’t hear about is the leadership needed for an AI project to achieve business success and the principles applicable to our own organizations for leading AI projects. That causes us to have unrealistic expectations of what AI can do, and when paired with only a vague understanding of the actions leaders must take for their AI projects to succeed, the result is that many of the AI projects we have in progress will fail.

This book addresses what differentiates the AI projects that will succeed from the ones that will fail. In one word, it is agency—a capacity that AI lacks. Conventional wisdom tells us that the determinant of success or failure of an AI project is the project team’s in-depth knowledge of AI technology. Believing that success with AI is determined solely by technical prowess confounds an enabler with a capability. Although you do need to have technical skills on your team for your AI project to succeed technically, to implement AI in your business, you also need to link technical success with business results.

The very definition of high tech is that it refers to a newly emerging technology. As a corollary, the best practices of that technology are only developed later, once the experiences and early application of technology are understood and systematized. This book introduces the best practices for using AI. It guides you through the treacherous waters of running an AI project in 2020 and beyond.

This book shows you how to lead an AI project toward business success, measure technical progress in business terms, and run your projects economically. You’ll learn how to determine which AI projects are likely to give you actionable results, and how to get those results. Finally, this book teaches you how to analyze your technical solutions to help you find the investment opportunities with the greatest business impact.