Applied Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction For Business Leaders

by Mariya Yao

Data: What Happened? At this level, organizations want to use descriptive and exploratory statistics to answer fundamental business questions about what has happened in the past. This requires you to have collected the right kinds of data. In practice, we have found that while many enterprises have collected plenty of data, it is often dispersed across departments and owners, in the wrong format for analysis, or simply insufficient for answering basic business questions. If this applies to the use cases for which you’re exploring AI and automation, you need to more clearly define your needs with requisite stakeholders in order to arrange for the correct data to be collected. Since knowing what has really happened in your business is critical for developing the best strategy for your future, this step is worth the investment of time, manpower, and budget. Information and Knowledge: Why Did It Happen? Once you and your executives are clear on what has happened in your business in the past, the next step is to understand why. During this phase, you move beyond statistical analysis of data into understanding and encoding expert logic for why certain results occurred. For example, your data may show that you had an unusually poor sales quarter last year. When analyzing your sales results along with data from human resources, you may discover that the poor showing is due to your top sales representatives leaving the company around that time. While some knowledge can be encoded, ...

Tighten the loop between data, insights, actions and results.