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AI Sprint
How to validate the idea of implementing AI
in your company in less than a month
Table of contents
Artificial intelligence: the right choice for me? 1
Your first steps with AI development 2
How to implement AI in less than a month 7
AI Sprint - from idea to PoC in just a few weeks 7
How does an AI Sprint work? 8
Workshops 9
What’s next? 10
Summary 11
Artificial intelligence: the right choice
for me?
You’ve probably heard that you should jump on the AI bandwagon before
it’s too late and competition leaves you behind. That’s true to some
extent - Artificial intelligence has proven to be a great augmentation to
human work and a successful tool in a wide variety of areas starting with
recommendation engines through chatbots to predictive analytics. It is
the right time to get to know AI better and see what it can do for you. And
as much as we support your decision to introduce artificial intelligence in
your business, we also know that you have to do it wisely.
Getting on board with full AI implementation is a big leap into the
unknown, so before you do that, give AI a test. Try it out, see for yourself
what it can do, and win some great arguments to convince your board, or
yourself, that AI implementation is a good decision. And it is, you’ll see.
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The thing with AI is that with the whole wide variety of use cases, it may
be difficult to decide which one (or ones) is the most relevant to your
business. In order to make a well-informed decision, you need to sift out
the options to arrive at a limited choice of solutions that matter. Every
business and every operation can be optimized with the use of AI, but
you need to make sure that you match your business needs with the right
AI technology.
Instead of taking a leap of faith into a big AI development project, you can
start with small steps, like a proof-of-concept (PoC), which will help you
understand what AI can bring to your company and how it’s done, and
will get you your first predictive model as soon as possible. It’s just a
better choice to focus on one segment in your company and test AI there
than to implement AI company-wide right away.
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Before you get on board with artificial intelligence in your business, you
should make sure that you’vetaken some basic steps to be ready for it.
This step may already be behind you, and if you know the basics, that
really is good enough. You don’t have to become an AI expert now but
it’s good if you know some basics. Read a few articles about what AI
offers, what its various use cases are. The use cases vary across different
industries, so you can check out the most successful AI use cases or
those specific to a given field: human resources
, e
-commerce, h
ealthcare
or finance, to name a few. You can also go through AI business use cases
in “An executive’s guide to AI”by McKinsey.
It’s useful to do some research to have a general idea of how you see AI
in your organization. Sure, it’s great to know that you like how Amazon
uses it but you don’t necessarily need the exact same thing - that’s why
the more you learn, the easier it is for you to crystallize the idea of AI in
your company.
When you decide to introduce AI in your company, it’s only natural you
get excited about the new opportunities and the benefits you’ll see in the
future. But before you even start, make sure you’re all on the same page.
Do all the decision-making parties support you in this undertaking?
How does your tech team feel about it? Have you already adopted some
AI in any capacity? Are there any obstacles you have to keep in mind?
As stated by many experts, most of the barriers to AI adoption are
related to people. Many people still don’t fully understand what AI is and
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how it works. The myth of AI being like the Terminator is around and
makes people believe that implementing AI is extremely difficult, maybe
even risky, and expensive. It’s difficult to give AI solutions a chance when
one doesn’t really understand how it works and what benefits it brings.
What’s more, many companies fear that they won’t be able to properly
plan AI implementation and estimate ROI.
AI is not just there to be a fancy part of your business. If you want it to
bring profit, you need to identify the area that it can improve. The AI use
case should address a specific pain, be it an internal one within your
organization or one of your customers. At this early stage, it’s good to
focus on the things that AI has already mastered, such as prediction,
automation or classification. Now, think about a part of your business that
could use this. You can predict e.g. customer behaviors and preferences,
demand for products, prices of resources.
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What can you achieve with the support of predictive models? Some of the
examples include:
● Churn reduction
● Customer segmentation
● Increase of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
● Improvement of profit margins
● Predictive maintenance
● Reduction of attrition rate
Data is an essential part of AI. It cannot (and will not) give you any
predictions if it’s not fed with large volumes of relevant data. If you
don’t know what types of data your company collects - check it. It can be
information collected through your service (e.g. customers’ purchase
history, demographic data, on-site interactions, etc.), excel data files
(xls or csv) with information about your recent sales, orders, etc., or any
other data, including that from your CRM, ad campaigns, email lists, traffic
analysis, social media or even public information, e.g. about your
competitors or the prices of resources.
Before you start working with AI, you need to know what kind of data
you’re dealing with.
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of failure as it’s easier to build an efficient system piece by piece and it
leaves room for improvement in each iteration.
At the same time, you can quickly see what AI brings: what model
parameters were achieved, what the results provided by the predictive
model are and how they can be interpreted. The proof-of-concept lets
you observe the first results of working AI in your organization, and it only
takes a couple of weeks to develop. This “test” of artificial intelligence
helps you better plan out further AI implementation and, if still needed,
wins you arguments to convince your executives or coworkers that it’s
worth to invest in AI now.
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How to implement AI in less than
a month
AI adoption may seem difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. But is it
really like that? Is there a way to try AI out and see how it works in
practice? Though it’s true that full implementation of artificial intelligence
takes time (and money), you don’t have to “go big or go home”.
You know what AI does and have an idea for it in your company. You may
even know some processes you want to improve with AI, so you can run
your experiment. It’s a great starting point and now you can go through
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the business and technical details of your project before you get to the
PoC. That’s where the AI Sprint comes into play: to prepare you for AI
implementation and give you results in the form of a PoC as soon as
possible.
The AI Sprint consists of 2-day workshops with our team, and a PoC of
a model that is chosen during the workshops. In the end, you will have
a real-life model trained on your data, helping your specific case. It can
actually be used in your everyday work and serve as a base for further
AI development.
Before the workshops, we ask our clients to prepare answers to some
crucial questions. These include:
● What information do you need to make good decisions within
a given process?
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● What data about your customers do you collect?
Your answers will help us specify project goals, map the process,
determine the necessary data, and plan the development in a more
efficient way. The workshops last 2 days and include process mapping,
identifying the most important decisions within the process, determining
what data is needed for the decisions and what data is needed for the
models, creating a map of systems and interfaces as well as pipeline
design, and selecting a model for the PoC.
Workshops
Day 2 takes on the technical issues connected with your predictive
model. We discuss the data needed, we map systems and interfaces,
design data pipeline, and estimate the costs of building and maintenance
of models. After day 2, we have the model selected and the work plan
with tasks each person involved has to perform after the workshops.
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What’s next?
During the demo, we present the results of the Sprint and
recommendations regarding subsequent models and implementation of
AI in your company. We suggest what data your company should start
collecting or what data should be purchased to improve the created
models, what models should be created next when you already have
more data, how to combine the models, and what the experiences
around the models should be.
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Summary
Artificial intelligence can help you gain competitive advantage thanks
to the use of innovative solutions. It also allows you to make great use of
the data you collect - and by now you surely know how valuable
a resource your data is.
In order to get your AI journey off to a good start, you need a deeper
understanding of specific use cases to choose the segment to begin with.
Luckily, now it’s possible to adopt the small steps approach in AI
development as well - which allows you to manage your investment more
efficiently. You don’t have to hire an in-house data science team and
introduce a huge AI strategy right away. The key is to find the business -
tech match within your company so that AI works for you and brings you
clear results.
In business, AI can do whatever task you want it to do. When trying to
find the best use of it, you have to carefully analyze internal processes
to identify the areas that would derive the greatest benefits from AI
,
and take into consideration the availability of data needed for the model.
Some solution may seem tempting as it promises profit but it may take
longer to access the right data or be more costly in terms of
development. At first, to build a proof-of-concept, you don’t need
complex solutions. Complexity comes with time, so once you’ve started AI
implementation in your organization, you will be able to extend the use of
artificial intelligence to other parts of your business.
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Unlock the potential of AI
in your business
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