Democratizing AI

Everyone I meet in business has heard about AI, they are excited about AI, and their eyes light up with a happy smile, and want to know more. I start off with examples of AI in daily life – Google Search predicting your text, Siri learning better answers to your questions, Waze re-routing based on ‘real-time’ traffic, Netflix recommendations, etc. They are often underwhelmed, unimpressed and disappointed. I ask ‘Why?’. They expect AI to be this geeky, out-of-the world, exclusive technology that can do magical things….like what? ‘I don’t know…you tell me you are in IT'.

Therein lies the challenge that the general narrative is technical, exclusive and pretentious, that we put off a lot of people in embracing it.  

AI has permeated our daily lives, without talking about AI, and the common theme is that they are B2C companies – they improve the customer experience so much that the underlying technology is irrelevant.

Some non-technical ideas to democratize AI

There are of work happening on democratizing AI at a technical level, so let me focus on the non-technical ideas

1)     Changing the narrative - The media, thought leaders and evangelist should put things in perspective - change the narrative from job losses to meaningful jobs and new roles, not put AI (or any technology) on a high pedestal that discourages people from getting involved.

2)     Humanise AI - Avoid the cliched robot images and technology-speak – just talk of the benefits and improvements

3)     On board the Board – The Board should embrace AI and cascade and communicate the benefits as well as blind spots and encourage staff to think, “what can be done to make life seamless and friction less, what one thing when improved will improve my work” and therein lies the spark for new ideas. Celebrate successes as well as the learnings

4)     Champion the ‘Analytics Translator’ role – They are at the intersection of the technical and operational teams and help translate the deep insights into business impact

How do we know when AI has been democratized?

When it’s no longer a ‘thing’ – it becomes inherent, innate and integral

I like this excellent analogy from Satya Nadella 

"Today we don’t think of aviation as ‘artificial flight’—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.”

Everyone is welcome!