Tech giants are finding that not everyone is ready for (or buying into) AI. So am I.

AI consulting companies from Google and Amazon point to a long list of things that companies need to check off in order to become “AI Ready”

A recent article in Wired discusses how technology giants such as Google and Amazon are starting AI consulting businesses to help customers take advantage of the power of advanced techniques such as machine learning. For instance, Amazon’s new consulting operation, called Amazon ML Solutions Lab, helped the NFL use machine learning to better assess players’ strengths and weaknesses. Google’s Machine Learning Advanced Solutions Lab lets customers such as insurer USAA work on projects with Google AI engineers at a dedicated facility at the company’s campus in Mountain View, California. It also offers a four-week training program to help customers’ engineers improve their AI chops.

So why are companies not ready to go head-on into the world of AI themselves, but instead are paying top dollar for AI consulting companies to help out? It may boil down to the following three reasons:

1. As the article mentions, there is still a critical shortage of AI talent – people who understand how to train, model and deploy large-scale AI solutions. They are just hard to come by and companies are not able to find enough of them – except at established AI shops such as Google and Amazon. So that’s where to go.
2. From what I hear from clients, general skepticism on what AI can do is still very prevalent within companies. We are going through the classic hype cycle (probably at is peak) where expectations for AI are overrated and appreciation of risks involved with AI is underrated. In such circumstances, it becomes extremely difficult to convince leadership and stakeholders to invest or buy into long-term AI commitments (in terms of people and money). Hence, for those who really need to tap into the power AI now, but cannot do so within the company, the next best thing is to go outside and hire consultants to do it for them – for a price of course.
3. As with any disruptive technology, it takes more than just adoption of a new technique or tool to truly capitalize on the power of the new breakthrough. The whole organization’s vision, people, processes and organizational structure will need to evolve in order to harness AI’s power. Most companies today are simply not “AI Ready”. Even if you gave these companies an elite team of AI experts FOR FREE, they probably are not ready to use them. Why? Because their vision, people, process and organizational structure are still stuck in the old way and it will take time to transform into the new way of business.

What can be done to accelerate the pace of adoption of AI? For starters, there needs to be a recognition from the top that the AI disruption is real and it is already happening. Once this reckoning takes place, leaders can then assess how “AI Ready” the organization is from a people, process, structure, risk and cultural perspectives. From there, a customized roadmap can be crafted to take the company from the “now” to the “future”. Until that happens, we will still be stuck in the “AI Not Ready” mode for a long time.