To kick-off the new year, Radical hosted a workshop focused around a framework I developed on the crucial questions founders must ask themselves to ensure AI application success. The program is part of Radical’s AI Founders Master Class series and participants included researchers from the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Mila (the Quebec Institute for Machine Intelligence), Stanford University, and Oxford University.
I have seen many high-calibre technology teams with strong academic research pedigrees run aground in the face of market realities or the challenges of production implementations. For researchers, building a successful AI business requires shifting from an academic to an “art of the applied” mindset.
To help make this shift, I have developed a series of questions to help AI teams navigate the subtleties and complexities of applying new technology. The framework involves a series of crucial questions in ten categories, including:
- The AI Goldilocks Zone – what can you do that others cannot, that customers need?
- Good enough AI – what capabilities, as well as technology and quality thresholds, do you need to achieve to satisfy customers? And, what are the competitive alternatives?
- Human in the loop – what is the optimal mix of human input required to make this application work?
These kinds of questions (along with others focused on areas such as usability, trust and bias) can serve as gating factors to success. Asking these key questions early in the product development cycle can dramatically increase the chances of success, lead to unique designs and approaches, and enhance the value of any AI project. I have found that teams capable of successfully answering these questions are better positioned to make that perilous journey across the chasm into the mass market. Ultimately, successful AI founders must take the application of AI as seriously as the algorithms that underpin their technology.