PAC-Man. How to start thinking about AI
Artificial Intelligence can come across as a complex area. It can be. Just as a car can be complex, you don’t need to know how the combustion engine works to know how to drive a car or know it’s purpose.
Think the same of AI.
What’ll help you get started is thinking of AI as able to perform reasoning across 3 areas. Predicting, Automating and Classifying.
It can PAC on numbers, pictures and text.
Predict
- The weather
- If you’ll meet your sales target
- If a customer will leave
- What time you’ll arrive
- What product you’ll buy
Automate
- Creating tweets
- Writing newspaper articles
- The amount of electricity supplied to a data centre
- Moving cars, boats, planes
- Directions from A to B
- Answering a customer service question
- Creating sales presentation material
Classify
- What’s in an email
- What is this person asking for
- Is this plant healthy?
- Is this urgent?
- If a customer is happy or not
- What type of screw is in this photo?
- If this video is explicit or not
- If this building extension in legal or not
Thinking about industry applications
For your industry, Andreessen Horowitz put together this framework to help brainstorm ideas.
We’ll talk about tech at a different time, but right now start by getting some interesting ideas of where to start.
Come up with as many ideas as you can and pick the easiest one to start investigating and experimenting with. Your entry into AI doesn’t have to be with drones and self driving cars. It can be as simple as when someone sends an email to your help desk, it’s automatically given to the right person based on the content of the email. So if I’m asking a billing question, it gets sent to accounts receivable, even though I never said ‘accounts receivable’ or even ‘billing’.
Check out my blog on chatbots for some inspiration.
