Chapter 1. AI for Management: An Overview

Written by IBM’s Dario Gil, Stacy Hobson, Aleksandra Mojsilovic, Ruchir Puri and John R. Smith

The authors of this chapter introduce basic concepts of AI. Broadly speaking, AI is a field of computer science that studies how machine can be made to act intelligently. According to the authors, AI has many functions, including, although not limited to, learning, understanding, reasoning and interacting. 

We have seen significant advances in AI in the past few years and have reached a point where AI is beginning to move from a narrow state (being focused on a single task in a single domain) to a broader one in which it can be applied to tasks across multiple domains: from strategy planning to product design and customer support, for example.

As business leaders aim to develop and deploy more AI within their companies, the authors encourage several considerations to be made: the plan for acquiring the necessary AI capabilities, the method for attracting AI talent, and the collection of the right data to train the AI models.

Leaders must be knowledgeable and intentional about these efforts for a successful deployment of AI within their organizations. More to follow.