Ask, Don’t Tell

tl;dr Even the greatest AI project has no value unless it solves a business need that compels people to use it.

The massive hype remains around AI and has caused many people surrounding AI efforts to be a strange combination of skeptical and overly enthusiastic. This has led to equal parts of confusion about what’s possible, fear about how jobs will change or be lost,? and unrealistic expectations about what AI projects will achieve. The makings of this problem are the fault of AI teams telling the rest of the organization about all of the incredible things that AI can do without spending the time to ask what people actually want to change about their work. This can lead to projects that, no matter how technically advanced and successful, may never recognize their value because they do not address a genuine business need from some part of the organization.

The implications?

Beyond basic AI education to raise the data literacy of an organization, the most important thing that we can do to proliferate AI is to ask questions. AI is simply a tool (albeit powerful) to solve business problems, however, this tool is useless if applied to areas with no value. Less mature AI teams should spend their time collaborating with different parts of the organization to identify how this tool can solve some of the greatest pain points, as opposed to screaming from the rooftops about how incredible AI is. More mature teams don’t even need to ask; they let the value of their work speak for itself and put the onus of identifying business value on the teams that bring them new opportunities.