Just Let the Ai Do It!
And other silly things business leaders say about Ai
The end is neigh, and I fear there is no going back as, according to previous bosses, clients, and the general public, Ai is here to take our jobs, our partners, and our livelihoods.
No but seriously, I was in a meeting with an old boss of mine where she was describing how once the data are ready and prepped properly, she will unleash my team, and simply…“Let the Ai do it”…and all will be solved.
The statement comes from a long-standing over-expectation that Ai can generally solve unsolvable business problems on it’s own…because it is intelligent…I mean, intelligent is in the name right!?!
But for those of us in the know…us “data science minded” people…Ai is no where near being able to simply solve business problems without intervention or set-up or preparation from highly skilled, often overlooked, data scientists like us.
Where does this lofty expectation come from? Well, it comes from a few places including the media, Hollywood, marketing (Watson is not nearly as smart as IBM sells it to be 😉), the term “unsupervised” in machine learning, and the idea that Ai is actually AGi or Artificial General Intelligence.
As you know, or are learning quickly, Ai is at once none and all of those things. Moreover, the potential for Ai to ever move in the direction of just being able to “do it” is readily stoked by cool advances such as GPT-3.
My lesson as I conclude this note from the industry; remember that most people you deal with have this expectation; the expectation that Ai is automated and intelligent.
But as we all know, the reality is that it is neither. Because we know that this gap in understanding exists, we must be sensitive in how we communicate our work, its results, and its potential impact to most people.
In short, read your audience. Identify if they want to be accurate, if they want to be awed, if they want to be compelled, or if they want to be supported. Each motivation in our audience creates a different way of communicating the value of data science and its contribution to Ai for any given solution.
But hey, let’s not belabor the points here because communication is an even harder skill to learn than data science.
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