Data-Driven Leadership and Careers

12 Steps to Applied AI

A roadmap for every machine learning project

For those who’ve been looking for a 12 step program to get rid of bad data habits, here’s a handy applied machine learning and artificial intelligence project roadmap. Well, it should properly be 13 steps, so we’ll start counting at zero to make it work.

(All links take you to articles by the same author.)

In practice you’ll need to iterate and backtrack plenty, BUT you should never start a step without at least attempting each of the previous ones.

Step 0: Reality check and setup

Check that you actually need ML/AI. Can you identify many small decisions you need help with? Has the non-ML/AI approach already been shown to be worthless? Do you have data to learn from? Do you have access to hardware? If not, don’t pass GO.

Pro tip: besides looking like a bunch of rampaging amateurs, leaders who try to shove AI approaches where they don’t belong usually end up with solutions which are too costly to maintain in production. Instead, find a good problem to solve and may the best solution win. If you can do it without…