How Managers Can Enable AI Talent in Organizations
Recent progress on the technical side of machine learning, particularly within deep learning, has followed an accelerating trend of businesses adopting AI technologies into their processes and workflows in the past decade.1 Some of these advances, such as Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, have demonstrated expert-level performance in domains previously held up as examples of areas where bots would be incapable of challenging human abilities.2
With respect to business outcomes, most of the exciting developments involve using deep learning for supervised learning problems. Supervised learning is a form of machine learning where you have input and output variables and use an algorithm to learn the function that relates input to output. The algorithm is “supervised” because it learns from training data where input and output are known in advance. These deep learning algorithms enable a different kind of software development — where instead of explicitly writing a recipe in code to complete a task, a model is trained with data to learn how to complete the task on its own. These types of algorithms are also especially useful for different types of prediction.3
Finding and enabling talented individuals to succeed in engineering these kinds of AI systems can be a daunting challenge for companies. Building organizational AI/machine learning capabilities requires a fundamental reengineering of existing business processes. These efforts naturally include hiring or training technical talent.4 Effective AI management, however, is perhaps even more critical. Ultimately, managers are responsible for shaping the design and direction of the organization’s strategy to maximize the returns of any new technology. With this comes the responsibility to manage the associated risks of building AI systems. Done properly, effective AI management can drive faster productivity growth and provide companies with a competitive advantage.
The first requirement for leaders in building a successful AI system is hiring and training the right talent. An AI team is effectively a type of data science team, but it builds a different suite of products. For example, instead of running experiments to determine the effect of a new ad campaign, an AI team might build a product image classifier to determine how store shelves are organized. These teams use many of the same tools, including common programming languages like Python and R, cloud-based computing environments, and database technologies. Provisioning a team to build machine learning models involves familiarity and knowledge of the organization’s technological hierarchy. Questions for leaders and teams to keep in mind include the following:
AI, like other forms of IT, requires a lot of preexisting investment in various other assets, such as technical expertise, businesses processes, data, and culture, to be productive and provide value in a new context.5 Early on, all of this additional complementary investment and change management can make it seem like AI (and data science as well) is a drag on productivity. After all, more resources are committed to generate some of the same outcomes. However, in time, what may have looked like initial dips in measured productivity will pay off with real returns. My research colleagues and I refer to this phenomenon as the Productivity J-Curve, and our research supports the idea that these up-front investments help organizations move toward the objectives stakeholders want to reach.6
In my own work partnering with LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research and Insights team, I found that a major portion of the business value of AI talent is reflected in these complementary assets. This makes sense given that many of these intangible assets, such as new processes, provide more value when AI skills become easier to acquire.
