Let’s be AI Literate First
Recently, I was invited to participate in a panel to discuss about how Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can start adopting and how to overcome the most common challenges that they have, such as talents.
The most frequently mentioned point is that for successful adoption of AI, from data collection all the way to a well-executed project, a company need to be literate on what AI can or cannot do i.e. understanding AI or AI Literate.
I will like to add on to this point further through my newsletter for the benefit of my subscribers. :)
Why is it important that the enterprises be AI Literate?
1. Knowing how AI works will add on more pairs of eyes into the organization to identify potential use cases. This will increase the chance and maturity of the enterprise in taking good advantage of AI as a tool for effectiveness and efficient problem solving or digitilization.
2. Knowing how AI works will increase the matching of expectations on what it can provide. One of the biggest failure of some AI projects out there is that non-technical teams, outside of the data and IT teams, have unrealistic expectations on what AI can do and in turn meaningful projects gets rejected or postponed indefinitely, due to lack of buy-in. Two common unrealistic expectation I hear quite often are “Can we get (90% to 100%) accuracy in decisions?” and “This is the data of 500 records, we can get a Machine Learning model to learn from it?”.
3. The current AI project usually requires machine learning as the core algorithm, and its usually supervised learning. As such, companies will need to deal with False Positive and False Negatives. It is important to put more heads together to think through how to handle these two. This is important in executing an AI project that will project well on the brand and PR image of the company.
4. Knowing how AI works also contributes to having stronger data governance, because employees will now have a better idea how good quality data can impact the use cases and participate actively in data governance process so that they can ensure good quality data is present.
These reasons are substantial enough for any enterprises who are seriously interested in being more proficient in artificial intelligence, to take advantage of data to start the journey today.
However, a small caveat here and that is to start on this AI Literacy Journey, a Data Literacy Journey should be undertaken first, in my opinion. Hei, I never say it is easy! :)
What are your thoughts?
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I admit to being one of those are are not buying in to every AI project. I especially disagree with AI as a replacement for writing and other arts forms as well as education, where it makes things too easy for students. I know the development and use of AI is growing fast, but I believe people need to be cautious and slow down.
I don’t disagree that to transform, you must first inform. That is, literacy precedes efficacy. That being said, if it is a colleagues’ mindset you need to change, they don’t necessarily need to know how generative AI works to see its value and begin to consider its application. Give them unfettered access to an enterprise version of ChatGPT or a safe, reliable system such as Firefly to experiment with. Sometimes, that it works trumps how it works.