Don't Start With AI—Start With the Bottleneck

So, Anastasia, many of our gurus out there are entrepreneurs or soon-to-be entrepreneurs.

For some of those leaders and entrepreneurs trying to implement AI strategies today, what advice would you give them to ensure their efforts are tied to measurable business outcomes rather than just experimentation? Do you have any thoughts for us there?

Yeah, so, yes.

I would say think about...

The problem you're trying to solve.

So this is a business play.

It's not a technology play for those who are technologists.

It's not a technology play.

It's a business play.

So avoid the temptation to apply the new shiny thing somewhere where you don't fully understand technology.

the problem area, the potential consequences, or applying it everywhere because it's benefited in five different places, it's going to benefit in five more, right? So think of, especially when we talk about AI, it's a...

It's a decision enabling tool.

It's an analytics tool.

It's really not an IT infrastructure tool.

Yes, there's an infrastructure associated with it.

Yes, you need compute power, but it's really about the problem you're trying to solve and using computational tools, analytics tools.

and really understanding and defining the metrics.

So what's the starting point? So you're trying to solve problem X, right? You're trying to solve trial design.

Okay, what's the starting point? What's the success rate today? What are we trying to go to in terms of success rate? How will you measure that? How long will it take for you to measure that? Because there is quite a bit of disillusionment sometimes when there's a lot of hype and then it takes a long time to actually get to the outcome.

So If you're upfront thinking and planning for all of these, then everyone's on the same page.

And someone may decide not to invest because it's going to take too long to see the outcome.

It's better for that to happen early on and for that to happen halfway through and you never scale.

And one thing that I mentioned before is review the operating model and the process and what needs to change, what roles are going to have to change.

What change management are you going to have to do? What's the process and operating model changes that you need to actually implement as you're implementing the new tool? And ideally, you're doing it at the same time, not as an afterthought.

Yeah, yeah.