Artificial Intelligence is not elementary school math, and it’s not rocket science either. As business decision-makers, the understanding of AI will not only allow you to make current product, service and processes better but also unleash new ideas for the future of the company.
These 10 books are highly recommended for business leaders to learn more about AI implementations in various areas from philosophical foundations, current cutting-edge developments, industry use cases, execution guides, and safety considerations to future explorations.
1. The Executive Guide to Artificial Intelligence: How to identify and implement applications for AI in your organization
Author: Andrew Burgess
Year Published: 2017
As an experienced management consultant, Andrew brought his professional insights into the book from explaining why now is the right time for implementing AI technologies, its capabilities to how companies can switch the mind of automation into actions. The book also talks about how to prepare the AI journey from prototyping to real applications; failure prevention, scaling up AI use cases and the future of AI are also discussed at the end of the book.
2. The Sentient Machine: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence
Author: Amir Husain
Year Published: 2017
This book has three parts including the introduction of AI, AI in today’s world and the future of AI. The author Amir has been a serial entrepreneur and innovator for many years; his understanding of varieties of industries allowed him to address AI use cases from Internet of Thing (IoT) to financial market. At the end of the book, Amir also tackled some philosophical questions related to AI such as automation and human job opportunity balance.
3. Artificial Intelligence: 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future
Author: Lasse Rouhiainen
Year Published: 2018
With an opening of a brief introduction of AI and its importance, the book then demonstrates several applications of AI in various sectors including finance, healthcare, education, and government. As an international thought leader in emerging technologies, Lasse also clarified how AI can change business processes from market research, customer service to accounting and human resource. In addition to theoretical opinions, the book gives couple examples of AI implementations as well such as Chatbots, Self-Driving Cars and Robots and how businesses can use them to create value.
4. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Author: Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig
Year Published: 2015
Stuart and Peter are two of the most famous contemporary computer scientists; they unveiled an amazing perspective to look at problems and solve them using AI in a fundamental approach. The book starts with explaining what is an intelligent agent, then introduces problem solving, knowledge and reasoning in the computer science realm; it leads to further discussion of planning, learning, communicating, perceiving, and acting using AI, which gives the readers a logical, philosophical, and systematic understanding of applying AI on problems.
5. The Industries of the Future
Author: Alec Ross
Published Year: 2017
This is a forward-looking work by Alec Ross, a former senior advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State. The book kicks off with the discussion of current robots and human machine (genetic code) development and then talks about the code-ification of everything including money, market, and trust. The author emphasised the importance of code as well as data in the information age; the insights are crucial for business leaders to navigate the company with the right tools and resources.
6. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Business: A No-Nonsense Guide to Data-Driven Technologies
Author: Steven Finlay
Year Published: 2017
The book first introduces AI and Machine Learning and their typical use cases by using predictive model; it then explains why Machine Learning is useful and how to use it to make business decisions. As a data scientist with more than 20 years experience of developing practical “value adds” machine learning solutions, Steven also introduced decision trees, neural networks, deep learning and its ins-and-outs during operations.
7. Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Author: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb
Year Published: 2018
“Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence” is a great book wrote by three strategic management and marketing professors Ajay, Joshua, and Avi. The book reaffirms the power of prediction by machine intelligence and the importance of data; it also discusses how decision making, business workflow, and jobs can be changed by implementing AI. In addition, risk and the impact to the society under AI strategy are also discussed at the end of the book, which is crucial during the transformation.
8. Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know
Author: Jerry Kaplan
Year Published: 2016
Jerry Kaplan is a serial entrepreneur and AI expert; he seamlessly combined both business and technology into this work. The book first introduces what is AI, the history and frontiers of it, and also the philosophy of AI followed by some controversial topics between AI and law. Besides the impact of AI on business, Jerry also addressed its impact on human labor, social equity, and possible impact of AI in the future at the end.
9. The Future of Leadership: Rise of Automation, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
Author: Brigette Tasha Hyacinth
Year Published: 2017
This AI book has three sections: 1. Rise of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence; 2. Leadership in an age of disruption; 3. The future of leadership. As an expert in leadership and management consulting space, Brigette started the book with the discussion about the revolution of automation to business efficiency as well as its impact to the job market; AI is getting smarter and smarter, and the question of whether AI will replace leaders is also discussed in the following section. At the end of the book, Brigette pointed out that although AI can replace human for certain type of jobs, the lack of emotional intelligence will limit AI’s ability to replace them all.
10. Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future
Author: Hemant Taneja
Year Published: 2018
The book is titled “Unscaled”, a term defining the power and potential of small businesses in the new era with new technologies; it contradicts people’s general view of conducting businesses: bigger is better. As a seasoned venture capitalist, Hemant explained how “unscaling” can happen in various industries including energy, healthcare, education, finance, media, and consumer products. In addition to examples, the book also discusses how different factors can lead to a different outcome in this AI century such as policy, corporation strategy, and personal choice.
As Andrew Ng says “AI is the new electricity”, so how to use this new electricity effectively and safely is still a question in the early time of AI implementation; these books would help business decision makers to understand AI, and use it in an appropriate way. It’s hard to tell all the stories of 10 books in one article but a glimpse view of them would help readers to decide which one to dive in thoroughly.
