AI Series – Part 1: Identify a Business Problem

I decided to write this series on implementing AI as there are some great articles from many authors but I wanted to create a more hands on ‘actionable’ process with steps that anyone can start today. After years of working on data models and systems here is my take on the AI build.

Before you begin take a few minutes to review why ‘Data is an Asset’ with ‘Are your Designs Antifragile?‘

1) Identify a Business Problem

I hear a lot of people speaking about identifying and solving a particular business ‘problem’ for AI. While identifying a business problem is an excellent starting point and good to get some training, the next level can be to identify a full business life cycle that drives value or revenue. An example would be a particular Sales, Marketing or Service life cycle that has defined metrics of measure from start to finish and milestones of time to define where the actions and metrics are in the business process. From here you can identify one of these challenged processes (or even go another level down if needed) and begin.

Now some of these challenged processes will not work for AI so you may need a few to identify one that works. Once you do identify an opportunity, this process will allow you to measure the current state, future state and better define the Gap (gap analysis exercise) to find if you are moving toward success. It will be easy to see the impact to that process and surprisingly the impact to other dependent processes upstream and downstream. So, once you have defined a process, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

Where do we go next?

2) Data Analysis: