CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 59

You have argued for some
time that AI is largely an
analytical technology and
that, for most organizations, it
is a straightforward extension
of what they do with data
and analytics.

challenge of the AI
skills shortage.

Machine learning in particular is a highly

prepared and a lot of the technologies

statistical activity. Predictive analytics is

and tools are the same. But for some,

very similar in the sense of predicting an

the idea of AI as an extension of analytics

outcome when you don't know it. Lots of

is " hype deﬂating. " People want to

companies I talk to about AI are saying

pretend it's something entirely

" we have been doing it for years, we just

new but it's not.

I say that a lot. It's why you want to
combine your AI center of excellence
with your analytics staff. Much of
the work for both activities-AI and
analytics-is getting the data ready and

didn't call it machine learning, we called
it analytics or statistical analysis. " But
what we see today in what we call " AI "
are more complex types of algorithms

What are other key challenges
that companies implementing
AI typically encounter?

and methods such as deep learning that
people didn't use in the past.

The big challenge is scaling AI, getting
it to production deployment. Usually, it's

Another recently much-improved AI

things like retraining people, work

method, NLP, or Natural Language
Processing, some of which is statistical
and some of which is semantic in nature,
we didn't previously consider to be under
the analytics banner. All of these new
approaches are challenging but
we are making good progress.

redesign, integrating AI with the current
technology architecture. All of these
tend to slow down implementation,
which is why you don't see widespread

Thinking about AI as an
extension of analytics must
also help enterprises meet the

production deployment today. It's similar
to what happens with analytics in many
organizations, where lots of models are

59
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4
