What does your Quest Giver want from you?

Good news! You have been entrusted with an important quest — to lead a research project and implement an intelligent system with elements of AI. You have been generously supplied with resources and your first results are highly anticipated.

Congratulations, so what do you do next?

So far, you have more questions than answers.

• What does your sponsor want?
• Can AI be a good solution?
• Will we deliver it in time?
• Will the requested budget be enough?
• What could go wrong?
• Have our scientists done something like this before?
• Is there something that’s critical to success that I don’t yet know?

There are no answers yet, but it doesn’t matter. The project is just beginning, and the essence of research is precisely to find answers, right?

You can be 100% sure that the main thing your sponsor wants from you is ROI. The project should bring in many times more money than was spent on it. Keep this fact in mind all the time. Don’t rush with your research and experiments. First things first, you need an assessment of the economic effect of the project which is as accurate as possible. During the rest of the project, the management of its timing and cost will be extremely important for you.

The second thing you may know for sure, is that your data science team will expect a Kaggle-style ML task from you. That is, they want you to provide data (the more, the better). The data should be labeled by a specialist who understands business. Scientists want to know which variable needs to be predicted, which target metric needs to be improved, and, most likely, they will ask about computing hardware. Everything is quite standard.

Unfortunately, between these two poles — an ROI-style business staging and a Kaggle-style data science staging, there is still a huge gap full of questions, uncertainties, and future effort. All of these things are left to you, dear Hero, to clarify, structure, and organize.

Prepare yourself and get ready for a journey. May this series of Research QUEST articles serve you as a guide.

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