Guide to preparing your business for AI
AI is molten hot, are you ready for it?
You’ve probably been living under some sort of naturally occurring aggregate of natural minerals (rock) if you haven’t seen the latest and greatest AI products shake up the Internet. GPT-3, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALLE-2 emerged from the darkness and have dramatically shifted the way companies have begun to think about AI and employing it within their products and companies. If you’re someone looking to understand how to approach AI in your business/startup this is the article for you.
The Basics
One of the keys to understanding how AI and Machine Learning can be used within your company is to understand the fuel, the juice, the sauce that this technology runs on. One word, DATA.
Data is king in this space. It’s what fuels all these large machine learning models and allows them to do things like personalization, recommendations, answer questions, or tell you that that photo is indeed a dog.
One of the best first steps to assess your AI/ML readiness is to examine your business from a data lens. What kind of proprietary data is your business capturing? How is that data being stored? Is there additional data we can be collecting that could be useful later on. The general rule of thumb when it comes to that last point is that more data is definitely better than less. Storage is cheap nowadays, take advantage of that.
The Democratization of Data
In the past machine learning was only really capable in companies with vast amounts of data because they were the only ones with enough of it to train these models to become accurate. Proprietary data was king and if your company didn’t have its own data, you were often out of luck. You’d have to start by scraping the Internet for the data you were after, a time-intensive and costly operation. This is why for years companies like Google dominated the space, they had access to all the world’s data.
But while that still remains true, the best machine learning solutions are going to be found in companies with the most proprietary data, the releases of these LLMs (Large Language Models) are starting to paint a different picture. These models have already consumed vast amounts of data during their training, and since these models are now available on demand to the public, they have essentially leveled the playing field in terms of public data access. Now you can have something like ChatGPT understand the basics of cooking and put together recipes, without ever downloading a single recipe…truly spectacular.
But don’t be lulled here. It is still very important to be collecting propriety data in this age because that is the data that will fine-tune these large scale models to your particular use case. It still remains important to start collecting data as early as possible, storing it properly, and constantly be on the lookout for new data opportunities within your business.
The Importance of Starting Early
This will seem a bit, no duh, but I really want to emphasize this point. Starting early when it comes to AI and Machine Learning is very important. Not collecting and storing data efficiently, can have a huge cost on a business when the time comes to leverage one of these solutions.
Trust me, at our consulting agency PressW we have clients all the time who have not taken the proper steps to preparing their data. When they come to us they cannot wait to implement their new shiny sales engine or recommender system, but are often met with the disappointing reality that time and work has to be taken to get their systems in order well before we can even start doing any ML work.
Lastly here, to you as a business owner you should be considering your data as basically equivalent to money. Not collecting data properly, to me, is like letting free money walk out the door. You would never turn down free money, so don’t miss the opportunity to capture your proprietary data from as early on as possible.
In Conclusion
I hope from this article you’ve began to understand some key steps to take when considering AI and Machine Learning and their applications within your business. If there’s anything to take away I would say it is that data is your asset. Don’t let it go to waste and definitely spend some time setting up your systems properly to capture, retain, and manage as much of it as possible.
When you’re ready to supercharge your business with an AI solution or want to know if your business is AI/ML ready, contact me at tarun@pressw.co.
