The most widely reported AI news of 2017 was the news of Alpha Go Zero ( an AI powered computer) defeating Alpha Go Master by self-learning the rules of the game.
While this may or may not have made you pause for a minute to wonder, what is worth pausing and considering is the fact that this incident was not expected to happen until 2025.
The game of Go, unlike chess, is incredibly complicated and has no value function from which to derive rules. It also increases in complexity as time passes and therefore most experts believed that the earliest that we can build an AI system that can handle this complexity is 2025.
And then in March 2016 Alpha Go Master defeated the current world Go champion 4 games to 5. The rest is history. Or perhaps the future.
At this point it’s worth noting an obvious but important aspect. In all cases of AI at work (or play), the bar to make better AI is inversely proportional to time. Which means, as I write this, and as you are reading this, somewhere in a data centre a GPU is munching on tremendous amounts of data to learn a skill that was till now only the turf of humans.
But while the technology bar is getting lowered (relatively speaking), businesses are taking time to respond and adapt.
In most cases, whether a startup or a big business — AI continues to be mis understood or not understood at all.
AI is for all
As a startup person, your focus is on your product / business and you are probably thinking, I will deal with AI when I get funded or when I get big enough, or when I hire a CTO.
I hear this all the time — we are very small, it is too early, there is no direct link to our business, etc.
To me, as someone trying to bridge the gap between AI and daily life / business, this is very counter-intuitive.
No matter what your business is, Artificial intelligence needs to be harnessed and leveraged now, or it will leave you redundant.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not another technology-crazy nerd pushing an algorithms-first, humans later approach. Far from it, I am asking you to take some time or resource out of your business — spend it in understanding what Artificial intelligence is and then use that lens to do things better in your own business.
AI is not a bubble
Unlike the dotcom bubble, or the Y2K wave or the e-commerce wave, this time it’s for real. We truly have transformational technologies — algorithms converging with hardware and data at scale — working 24x7 to change things around us.
While many around us throw buzzwords and jargon carelessly, causing others to think it’s a bubble or a wave, this is not the case. I urge you, as a business leader or a startup owner to see this yourself — read up online, ask questions or take a step back and think about it this way -
Every business generates tons of data each day, and now we have a near-generalised capability for machines to understand that data and act upon it. Wherever you needed humans to flag problems, make decisions, plan things till now, machines can and will take over.
The question then is, how will you leverage this in your business ?
AI is not expensive
At this point you are probably thinking of budget allocation or hiring to do AI. You are probably thinking, I won’t do an app, I will hire an AI guy. Or you have already written it off due to lack of budgets. But the irony is, the first step in AI for a startup begins (or should begin) at no cost at all.
The first expense is a personal one — all you have to do is to find time and develop an understanding of AI. Not to be come a data scientist or a ML expert, but enough to understand what this is about.
There are enough resources on the internet to help get you started on this. What’s needed is the understanding that you need to invest this time for the future of your business.
Successful AI excercises begin with the right thought process and the right thought process begins with right understanding. Before you allocate budgets, hire developers or make any plans, spend a few weeks reading, thinking and talking to people. But do make it a priority.
The time-scale has collapsed
We are now living in an era of hyper-exponential technological growth. This is a point of no-return in so many ways for mankind at large. What you are likely to see going from here is more accessible AI — which means more power in your hands, if you are ready for it.
But it also means faster change than ever before. Whether you are in e-commerce, recruitment, traditional brick and mortar, publishing or news you will get impacted at a faster rate by AI driven change agents.
As a CXO it is incumbent upon you to take charge and educate yourself about AI and how you can use it in your business.
