Mariya Yao - Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook For Business Leaders

The authors of Applied AI have incredible depth of expertise and experience in AI, and they make the complex topic accessible to everyone. Its rare to find technology experts as engaging and thought -provoking.

Ste phen Strauss

Head of Sales Enablement and Insi ghts, PayPal

This book cuts the fluff and arms business leaders with exactly the right foundational knowledge to lead successful AI initiatives at their companies. Its hands down the best playbook for executives starting on their automatio n journey.

Jack Chua

Director of Data Scie nce, Expedia

As a deep learning researcher and educator, Im alarmed by how much misinformation and misreporting occurs with AI. Its refreshing to see a practical guide written by experienced technologists which explains AI so well for a business audience. In particular, Im glad to see this book addresses critical issues of AI safety and ethics and advocates for diversity and inclusion in th e industry.

R achel Thomas

Co-Founder, Fast.ai and Assistant Professor, USF Da ta Institute

Full of valuable information and incredibly readable. This book is the perfect mix of practical and technical. If youre an entrepreneur or business leader, you need this guide.

Jeff Pulver

Co-Founder, Vonag e and MoNage

Applied AI is the perfect primer for anyone looking to understand the enterprise implications of emerging artificial intelligence technologya must read for any business leader intending to stay ahead.

Alex Stein

Sr. Director, Strategy & Business Development, Viacom International Me dia Networks

Recent progress in AI will dramatically impact all aspects of a business. This excellent book provides a practical examination of how to harness disruptive technologies to achieve scalable and sustainable busine ss success.

Steven Kuyan

Managing Director, NYU Tandon Future Labs

Applied Artificial Intelligence

A Handbook for Business Leaders

Copyright 2018 by TOPBOTS Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by co pyright law.

For permission requests, contact the publisher Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the website ad dress below.

Printed in the United State s of America

First Printing D ecember 2017

ISBN 978-0-9982890-2-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9982890- 5-2 (Kindle)

Edited by N atalia Zhang

Cover Illustration by Van essa Maynard

Interior Design by Van essa Maynard

Website: www.appli edaibook.com

Email: authors@appli edaibook.com

For all of you who build technology to make tomorrow better than today.

Table of Contents

Applied Artificial Intelligence

Who This Book Is for

Applied Artificial Intelligence is a practical guide for business leaders who are passionate about leveraging machine intelligence to enhance the productivity of their organizations and the quality of life in their communities. If you love to drive innovation by combining data, technology, design, and people, and to solve real problems at an enterprise scale, this is you r playbook.

There are plenty of technical tomes on the market for engineers and researchers who want to master the nitty-gritty details of modern algorithms and toolsets. You can also find plenty of general interest content for the public about the impact of AI on our society and the futu re of work.

This book is a balance between the two. We wont overload you with details on how to debug your code, but we also wont bore you with endless generalizations that dont help you make concrete business decisions. Instead, we teach you how to lead successful AI initiatives by prioritizing the right opportunities, building a diverse team of experts, conducting strategic experiments, and consciously designing your solutions to benefit both your organization and society as a whole.

How to Use This Book

The first part of this book, What Business Leaders Need to Know, gives executives an essential education in the state of artificial intelligence today. We recommend reading this part in full before pursuing AI projects for your or ganization.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a non-technical introduction to AI, the techniques used to power modern AI systems, and the functional differences between different levels of machine intelligence. While you do not need to memorize every detail, a passing familiarity with technical definitions will help you separate hype from reality when evaluating a project proposal for your own o rganization.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe promising applications of AI in society as well as challenges that arise from biased or unethical algorithms. Youll learn how collaborative design is essential to ensuring that we build benevolent AI systems.

In the second part of our book, How to Develop an Enterprise AI Strategy," we walk you through the strategic and methodological steps required to implement successful AI projects for your company. These chapters act as a reference guide as you are building your initiatives. Read through them once to familiarize yourself with the content, and then refer back to specific sections as needed during you r projects.

Chapters 6 and 7 teach you how to prepare your organization to succeed in AI projects. You will learn strategies to manage important stakeholders and attract techni cal talent.

In Chapter 8, we guide you through exercises that will help you to identify opportunities for AI adoption within your organization and develop a business plan for implementation and deployment. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 explain common technical challenges you will encounter in building AI and how to ove rcome them.

The last section of our book, AI For Enterprise Functions, highlights popular AI applications for common business functions. Chapter 12 summarizes some of the challenges of adopting AI solutions for enterprises. Chapters 13 and 14 introduce common AI applications in essential administrative functions like finance, legal, and HR, while Chapters 15 and 16 describe how machine learning can dramatically improve business intelligence, analytics, and software development. Chapters 17, 18, and 19 focus on the revenue-generating functions of sales, marketing, and custome r service.

Finally, Chapter 20 emphasizes the ethical responsibility that you, as business and technology leaders, have towards your workforce as well as towards ensuring that any technologies that you build have a benevolent impact on your customers, employees, and society as a whole.

Because AI technologies evolve very quickly, we created an educational website, appliedaibook.com , where we offer updated content and detailed case studies for specific industries. Supplemental content for this book can be found in our resources section at appliedaibook.com /resources .

We also created social communities and discussion forums for our readers to connect with us and each other, which you can join by visiting appliedaibook.co m/community .

What Business Leaders Need to Know About Artificial Intelligence

1. Basic Terminology in Artificial Intelligence

Think about the most intelligent person you know. What about this person leads you to describe him or he r this way?

Is she a quick thinker, able to internalize and apply new knowledge immediately? Is he highly creative, able to endlessly generate novel ideas that youd never think of? Perhaps shes highly perceptive and hones in on the tiniest details of the world around her. Or maybe hes deeply empathetic and understands how youre feeling even be fore you do.