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Announcement(s):
I’ll be speaking as part of a panel at the upcoming Beryl Elites Conference in NY November 6-7.
Please join me!
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … People are racing to understand the impact of AI and be to be responsible about it’s implementation.
QUOTES
“Data even more strategic asset in age-of-AI” - Sarah Guo
“A good data strategy is aligned with the company strategy. It is aligned because it is derived from it! A good data strategy exists in a company with a clear direction from the top to make data the most important thing.” – Sven Bolnojan
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Consumer vs Creators)
#1 – Casey Ciniello from SD Times published From Insights to Decision Intelligence: Navigating the Modern BI Landscape. October 2023.
My Take: The author captures the root of much of what is going on in the data space these days: “data is no longer scarce; instead, it has become an overwhelming flood that demands careful navigation”. Developing a holistic approach to staying on top of all that is happening is a challenge. Of course, the purpose of all of this is to help individuals & organization make better decisions. The author’s four elements of decision intelligence are listed below…I feel like most are still in “Data Collection & Analysis” stage.
Data Collection & Analysis
Predictive Modeling
Optimization
Cross-Functional Collaboration
#2 – David Kiron & Steven Mills of MIT Sloan’s Mgmt Review published Is Your Organization Investing Enough in Responsible AI? ‘Probably Not,’ Says Our Data. October 2023.
My Take: AI is happening really fast. Regulatory bodies are not equipped to make decisions that in a timely enough fashion…effectively we are regulating yesterday’s news or trying to forecast tomorrow, which is tough to do.
Trying to strike the balance between being responsible yet still encouraging innovation is the key. Regulation is a good thing. Once guardrails are in place, we are free to drive faster. The key is going to be smart regulations that encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking and further innovation. This is really tough in such a fast moving space. The authors have three suggestions for companies investing in RAI (Responsible Artificial intelligence).
Build leadership awareness of AI risks
Accept that investing in RAI will be an ongoing process
Develop RAI investment metrics
#3 –Ethan Mollick published Working with AI: The Paths to Prompting. November 2023.
My Take: We will all be prompt engineers. The panel in which I am participating Monday is about New Sources of Alpha. In my opinion the new alpha will come from asking better questions of the data. AI plays a big role here as it makes it very easy to engage with data.
This was a very thoughtful article about how to ask better questions & how AI (ChatGPT) improves as a result of your better questions. Anyone engaging with ChatGPT in any serious way is seeing massive performance gains.
I relate this to SQL queries … it is often very difficult to translate your question from natural language to SQL to get from the data that which you are seeking. With ChatGPT, the question you ask can be imperfect or even conversational, and you get good answers … while at the same time helping the system “learn” what you are trying to accomplish … making you even more efficient. In other words, it is getting easier to ask better questions of the data.
BONUS: Chris Israelski of IR Magazine published How AI can transform the potential of investor events. October 2023. “The centerpiece of and reason for every investor event is the story, and the ability to develop a compelling narrative that resonates with stakeholders can make all the difference in capturing attention and inspiring informed decisions.”
What else I am reading:
HubSpot to Acquire B2B Intelligence Leader, Clearbit (value will flow towards data owners). November 2023.
Mehdio published Dancing your way through the pathless data career. October 2023. (I like just about any article mentioning Ikigai).
Lots of articles on AI regulation this week (see this week’s theme):
FACT SHEET: President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. October 2023.
Pymnts published Companies Need to Be ‘Adaptive’ and ‘Curious’ in 2024 as Regulations Loom. October 2023.
Timothy B. Lee published Joe Biden's ambitious plan to regulate AI, explained. October 2023.
Source: Brad Schneider’s presentation about Artificial Intelligence, External Data & The Next Evolution in Analytics and Decision Intelligence. October 2023.
My Take: This is a YouTube video of a presentation Brad gave at a recent conference. Most interesting to me was the real-world use cases for AI. For me, the reason AI is so interesting is that this is actually impacting my day-to-day world. I use ChatGPT (almost) daily to help with basic tasks. While not perfect, it helps with content creation, basic coding challenges, and basic things that used to take me hours … I can now get done in minutes. And we are still just at the beginning and it seems progress is accelerating.
Brad makes the point (minute 18:00) that good data is needed. We now have an abundance of data … the next step will be the tools improving to a level where decision-makers can more easily get answers from the mountains of data (& trust the answer).
Brad’s team has actually created real-world tools that use AI to solve real-world problems. Brad said a challenge is articulating to the AI how to complete the task…Brad compares this to explaining something to a human (“we are all prompt engineers” … see above highlighted Ethan Mollick article).
Highlights (29-minute run time):
Minute 01:00 – AI getting much better very recently; previously un-solvable problems now solvable.
Minute 05:00 – Nomad & Brad’s background
Minute 06:45 – Brad runs through some ideas about AI use cases (data quality, data discovery, notifications)
Minute 16:15 – self-service analytics. I highlight this real-world use case as this is a huge challenge that would make a big change the data world
Minute 18:00 – you need good data & good AI
Minute 20:00 – Q&A for the remainder of the time
Source: Katharine Miller of HAI (Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence) published Introducing The Foundation Model Transparency Index. October 2023.
Keeping with this week’s theme about responsible AI.
BONUS: Really enjoying messing around with Information is Beautiful … some examples:
This is one example, many more available. Simplicity is difficult.
The ability to visually share ideas in such a fashion that anyone can “get it” is a special trait.
Source: Category Pirates The Content Pyramid. April 2022.
I aspire to be a category creator. I am implore my kids to not be among the 90% of the people who just mindlessly consume…but rather strive to move into the creator role.
I am in the “curator” role today … with this email being a good example of curating. Easy to do, but hard to do well.
I am seeking those obvious, or perhaps non-obvious, connections that will drive more people to be interested in what I am saying.
Stages as they apply to this ADW:
Level 1 – simply consume news in the broadly defined Alternative Data space
Level 2 – give some thought to what is interesting and share with “my take” … next step would be sharing a more insight beyond just my opinion
Level 3 – Obvious connection … perhaps this would be me taking the ADW into a more focused area , perhaps just data quality & going deep, or perhaps just focusing on data for a specific industry end-market (open to feedback here).
Level 4 – Non-obvious connection … this is creating a new area altogether … these are the people that create new business.
Level 5 – Category Creation; knowing exactly what audience you are writing for…hopefully this is big enough to pay the bills for you!