When it comes to artificial intelligence, don't try to go it alone. IT departments, no matter how skilled and ready developers and data scientists may be, can only go so far past proofs of concept. It takes people --from all corners of the enterprise and working collaboratively -- to deliver AI success,
In discussing lessons learned about AI in recent years, industry experts point to the need to get the people from across the enterprise on board. "A copious amount of training data and elastic compute power are not the cornerstones for successful AI implementations," says Sreedhar Bhagavatheeswaran[1], global head of Mindtree Consulting.
That cornerstone of AI success is people -- not only AI skills, but involvement from all disciplines, from marketing to supply chain management. In recent years -- and especially over the past year, as the need for automated or unattended processes accelerated, "enterprises learned that they must get stakeholder buy-in, with a true champion for AI within the organization's leadership team," says Dan Simion[2], VP of AI and analytics at Capgemini Americas.
A concerted AI development and deployment effort also needs "strong governance, internal marketing within the company, and proper training to fuel further adoption of the AI initiatives across the business' functional areas," he adds. The key is being able to showcase the valuable insights being generated by these models,
In efforts to make AI pervasive, "enterprises are now conscious of critical factors such as identifying the right journeys and use cases where AI intervention can make a business impact, operationalizing AI by establishing an AI operations and governance mechanisms, and blending the right proportion of data engineering and AI talent," says Bhagavatheeswaran.
The catch, of course, is many of these efforts get undermined by organizational