CHAPTER 1 Climbing the AI Ladder

       “The first characteristic of interest is the fraction of the computational load, which is associated with data management housekeeping.”

       —Gene Amdahl

       “Approach to Achieving Large Scale Computing Capabilities”

      To remain competitive, enterprises in every industry need to use advanced analytics to draw insights from their data. The urgency of this need is an accelerating imperative. Even public-sector and nonprofit organizations, which traditionally are less motivated by competition, believe that the rewards derived from the use of artificial intelligence (AI) are too attractive to ignore. Diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, machine learning, deep learning, and AI complement the use of traditional descriptive analytics and business intelligence (BI) to identify opportunities or to increase effectiveness.

      Traditionally an organization used analytics to explain the past. Today analytics are harnessed to help explain the immediate now (the present) and the future for the opportunities and threats that await or are impending. These insights can enable the organization to become more proficient, efficient, and resilient.

      However, successfully integrating advanced analytics is not turnkey, nor is it a binary state, where a company either does or doesn't possess AI readiness. Rather, it's a journey. As part of its own recent transformation, IBM developed a visual metaphor to explain a journey toward readiness that can be adopted and applied by any company: the AI Ladder.

As a ladder, the journey to AI can be thought of as a series of rungs to climb. Any attempt to zoom up the ladder in one hop will lead to failure. Only when each rung is firmly in hand can your organization move on to the next rung. The climb is not hapless or random, and climbers can reach the top only by approaching each rung with purpose and a clear-eyed understanding of what each rung represents for their business.

      You don't need a crystal ball to know that your organization needs data science, but you do need some means of insight to know your organization's efforts can be effective and are moving toward the goal of AI-centricity. This chapter touches on the major concepts behind each rung of the metaphorical ladder for AI, why data must be addressed as a peer discipline to AI, and why you'll need to be creative as well as a polymath—showcasing your proficiency to incorporate multiple specializations that you'll be able to read about within this book.

Readying Data for AI

      The limitations can be technological, but much of the journey to AI is made up of organizational change. The adoption of AI may require the creation of a new workforce category: the new-collar worker. New-collar jobs can include roles in cybersecurity, cloud computing, digital design, and cognitive business. New-collar work for the cognitive business has been invoked to describe the radically different ways AI-empowered employees will approach their duties. This worker must progress methodically from observing the results of a previous action to justifying a new course of action to suggesting and ultimately prescribing a course of action.

      When an organization targets a future state for itself, the future state simply becomes the current state once it's attained. The continual need to define another future state is a cycle that propels the organization forward. Ideally, the organization can, over time, reduce the time and expense required to move from one state to the next, and these costs will be viewed not as expenses but as derived value, and money will cease to inhibit the cycle's progression.

      Worldwide, most organizations now agree that AI will help them stay competitive, but many organizations can often still struggle with less advanced forms of analytics. For organizations that experience failure or less than optimal outcomes with AI, the natural recourse seems to be to remove rigor and not increase it. From the perspective of the AI Ladder, rungs are hurried or simply skipped altogether. When an organization begins to recognize and acknowledge this paradigm, they must revisit the fundamentals of analytics in order to prepare themselves for their desired future state and the ability to benefit from AI. They don't necessarily need to start from scratch, but they need to evaluate their capabilities to determine from which rung they can begin. Many of the technological pieces they need may already be in place.

Organizations will struggle to realize value from AI without first making data simple, accessible, and available across the enterprise, but this democratization of data must be tempered by methods to ensure security and privacy because, within the organization, not all data can be considered equal.

Technology Focus Areas

      Illustrated in Figure 1-1, the level of analytics sophistication accessible to the organization increases with each rung. This sophistication can lead to a thriving data management practice that benefits from machine learning and the momentum of AI.

      Organizations that possess large amounts of data will, at some point, need to explore a multicloud deployment. They'll need to consider three technology-based areas as they move up the ladder.