Skip to main content

Speaking AI (artifical intelligence)


You're talking but I can't hear you.  Everyone can certainly understand this condition; the "Peanuts" parents who sounded exactly like your own, your significant other while you watch your favorite game on TV, or most importantly a work colleague or partner which you are attempting to communicate a thought or vision.  All of these, and many other examples, have plagued our organizations long past the childhood game of telephone (passing your words to another, and on to another, etc.). 



So what?  What has changed?  Besides the velocity of products hitting the market, the requirements that we have for our business now needs to be interpreted by data scientists, yet another abstraction layer from the field conditions.  Think about this example;

  • TODAY:  we often think in binary terms, if "x" happens do "y" …  take a sales person seeking potential leads by searching a system for the last time we made contact
  • TOMMORROW:  consider variables that you may have discounted due to the complexity of obtaining and correlating the information.. In contrast to our sales scenario above, proactively feed leads to a sales person in real time using algorithms designed to increase the odds of closing a sale, looking at email sentiment, appointments, breaking news or social trends.



After several opportunities to work with data scientists on projects over the last few years, I believe that one of the most effective forms of communicating thoughts is via "storytelling".  Consider this approach and put down, on one page, your thoughts related to what a machine learning algorithm can and should do for you.  Sections may include a goal, impact, before, driving the point, conclusion, after.  Dare to dream, think about all of the factors which impact intelligent decisions.  If you were to replicate your thought process and reflect on what you would do different given "x" results in the future, you are on your way to "speaking AI"



The time is now to start building strong AI capabilities as these take time to perfect and farm useful data (to be used for predictive and prescriptive modeling) in the future. 



-----

Next post:  in the "people" business can you really measure performance?

Questions?  feel free to leave replies or direct message me

See all of the "last mile worker" posts here:  http://lastmileworker.com

-----

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are "mistakes" good or bad?

One of the attributes that make a great technician is the fact that they have made a lot of mistakes. Our biggest challenge is recalling those mistakes ourselves and as importantly sharing them with others on our team. Every single day we go out and fix things, many of them are routine and may not require any form of documentation or sharing; however, there are those instances where we have discovered gold. The trick is to make sure that we can learn from our mistakes in a systematic manner and have the ability to spread the information throughout our organization in a useful and relevant way. Corrective action, an integral part of a quality system, is the absolute best vehicle to put in place for your organization. Some of you may have been turned off by the words "quality system", don't worry you can still deploy a corrective culture without having to understand completely how corrective action and quality management systems work. The process is very straightf...

months to aquire, moments to lose

It is just hard to imagine that one of the most common reasons maintenance contracts are lost is because people don't show up and don't pay attention to the details.   In many cases maintenance is an investment to keep the life of your asset running for a protracted period of time. However the length on many maintenance contracts is not even close to the life expectancy of that equipment, so if you don't really have any idea what maintenance is being performed then how do you really know if it's being done to your specification? Thus, it really boils down to business elements, assuming that you are actually performing the work, our focus needs to be on how you are differentiated. Let's take a look at a couple of the most common business-related reasons why people lose maintenance contracts. Not showing up ; managing contracts can be complicated between the sites, number of assets, and the frequencies at which items need to be maintained, can a...