Usually if you are working for a company that is not a software company, you are not working with a lot of developers. Your AI data team is not so big and a lot of people are looking at you as someone who could solve every problem, not only programming problems.
Of course you know that is not possibile for one developer solve every kind of problem of programming at least. Nowdays the things are very very complex and if you want to get things done, you need to have a very interdisciplinary team working with you.
I know that you have the better intentions to get results from your Ai project and show the potential of this technology to all, but
- your team is undersized for the total amount of work that you need to do
- Ai is difficult, you cannot predict the exact results of your algorithm before have tested it
- Testing is time consuming and you have deadline
- You have not enough support from your colleagues, and you have to do all the work by yourself.
- You need to get some results.
- If you are working in R&D you are not working for something that is the core business of your company. (At least not yet)
Even if each point on the list is important to be able to successfully conclude an AI project, I will stop on point 6 because I consider it the most important. Let me clarify this with an example and you will understand how to get all the money you want.
Imagine that you are working for a company that makes bread. It is an example, but you can translate this concept to every company. You work there because is the best company that make bread and their are looking for data scientist.
They heard about Ai and all the hype that is generated around this filed, so they decide to hire some data scientist, because they have a lot of data and someone said that data is the new oil.
Ok so they hired you as a data scientist because they wanted to do incredible things with data. Double their revenue, cut their cost by 90% and other incredible things. Actually after some years working in this field i have not really understood what are really people expectations on AI.
But anyway you are now working as data scientist: the sexiest job of 21th Century. Maybe you read something about this. My opinion is that who wrote this, never do a day as a data scientist.
But we continue with our story. Now as a data scientist all people inside company are sending every kind of possible data to you. They don’t care if are good or bad data, they simply think data is data. So in the end you got GBs of data, saved in a database or csv files and you cannot understand what you need to do with this data.
Yes because as a data scientist you know what kind of algorithms use to extrapolate good information from data, but in the end you never make bread in a production line. So is difficult for you to understand what are good and bad data, because you have not the experience on this filed. You are only a data scientist
But now your manager says. “Hey you have data, now you can do the incredible things that we expected when we hired you. Can you please share us some results next week?”. You will try to explain to your manager that is not feasible, see points above, but he would like to see some results otherwise he probably think that AI is a rip off or you are not good enough.
In this scenario you will start to clean data(even if you don’t really know what are good and bad data), start coding because you need to show something(without coding is difficult), make some test and next week is arrived. You need to show some results.
Of course you algorithm will not working properly, not because your are not a good developer, but because the initial premises of the project were unreal. So in the end you try to justify your work because you need more time, you need to understand better the process classify what are good data and bad data, debugging your algorithm because you have write code, but you have not tested it ecc…
But now happend the most dramatic things in your data scientist carrer. Follow me because it is very important. Managers excpectation on AI is very high, because Google Facebook and others show impressive results from this technology. They use AI to improve their business and now AI is a core part of their Business.
They started developing and testing this technology years ago, so people inside Google, the managers at least, know what AI can really do and how can improve their business.
So they are investing on it. Millions of dollars.
You are working for a bread company where its core business is making bread, not developing the new search engine as Google or connecting the world as Facebook.
Your company is making bread and AI is not part of the core business
So in this scenario you are not in the core part of your company, but you are in the R&D deparment and if you are not able to get very good results from your work, will be very difficult for you to get money for your projects, to convince your company to hire more developers, to create a very good team ecc…
You know that all this things are essential to get result from an AI project, but your company is not sure if AI is for their business, so they will wait.
So you start to think as a developer that all people in that company are not competent, the company have to invest in this technology because is the future.You cannot understand why they cannot see the potential of Ai for their business.
Unfortunately people that are not familiar with coding, cannot understand the potential of a technology unless the see some concrete results.
Unfortunately in this case you become a marginal function for your company. You not increse their revenue so in the end will be very difficult for you to advance your carrer at least if you stay in that company or if you are not able to change their opinion on AI and show good results.
If you are still with me you now undestand why it is very important to show some results to your manager. It’s important to get hype inside your company to show they that AI is powerfull, it is the future of their company.
You need to show that they need to invest on it, hire good people more and more. If you can achive this you will become the most important person of the company, because you will be the one to lead the change. Change to company to data-driven-company and make AI part of the core bussiness.
This way, even if you don’t have a lot of resources initially, you can use Ai4Prod to show some results in a short time and be able to develop your algorithm in production. Later you can always use Ai4Prod to manage increasingly complex projects. Sure it will take a little more work, but I assure you it will be rewarding, because you will see things work out.
f you want to see how it works download our repository and follow the documentation on how to get started from here
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