The AI in Business Podcast

It's the final week of our month-long series on planning your corporate AI strategy. This week we speak with Shane Zabel, Head of AI at Raytheon. Shane talks to us about the phases of building an AI strategy. What are the steps? He discusses the importance of finding an AI pioneer at a company who can build some initial ideas of what AI use-cases could be viable at the company. If you're in the process of analyzing AI use-cases for your company or clients, we created a guide for this exact topic. Learn more about it at emerj.com/t3.

This week, we speak with Scott Nowson, AI Lead at PWC Middle East, about the critical capabilities nontechnical business people need to understand to be able to advance their career and apply AI in their industry even if their company hasn't started with AI yet. Scott has an uncanny ability to convey business lessons on AI, and he's one of the few people who got our full Getting Started with AI report before today's formal launch. The report is finally open, and in it, listeners can find the must-know knowledge that will allow you to take your AI interest and turn it into real career opportunity without learning any code. Listeners can learn more about it at emerj.com/a1

In this episode, we speak with Adam Bonnifield, VP of AI at Airbus, one of the youngest executives at the firm. He talks about how to think about starting a corporate AI strategy, which for him entails beginning with the data assets. Adam thinks through how to take account of those assets and what kinds of people need to be part of the conversation to unlock the most fruitful AI applications in an established company.

This is a special bonus episode of AI in Industry about advancing your career in the era of AI, specifically for non-technical professionals. If you don't want to learn to code but still make yourself tremendously valuable in the era of AI, this episode is for you. We put together a report on this topic that will be coming out this month, all about getting started with AI in business for nontechnical professionals. Interested listeners can go to emerj.com/c1 to learn more. This week, we have Germán Sanchis-Trilles on the podcast. He's one of our technical advisors, well-schooled in natural language processing, and extremely experienced in applying AI in business. In this episode, he reviews some of the key themes from our upcoming report, including critical ideas about how nontechnical professionals can involve themselves in AI while at work.

This week, we speak with Carlos Escapa, Global AI and ML Practice Leader for Amazon Web Services. Carlos speaks with us this week about starting an AI strategy with a more practical approach. Instead of thinking about how to radically reshape a key part of your business with AI or use AI for AI's sake, Carlos talks about instead thinking about where AI fits in with what your business is already doing. He provides some thought experiments to run through for thinking through this and how to get started with AI.

Last month, we focused on advancing your career in the age of AI, and this month we have a new theme: building your corporate AI strategy. At Emerj, much of our work in the public and private sector is in building an AI strategy and giving organizations data on where the ROI is in the AI world. This week, we speak with Ian Wilson, former Head of AI at HSBC and a research advisor for our banking work. He has rare experience applying AI strategically at one of the largest banks in the world, and I think he is just the person to start off this month's theme. Ian talks about beginning to plan your AI strategy.

This is our final episode in our series on advancing your career in the era of AI this month. We had more Linkedin messages on this theme than any we've done before, and it got me excited to think about what we could do with this kind of series in the future. In this episode, we distill the insights from this month's series with insights from our broad catalog of interviews with AI-minded executives throughout the many years doing this podcast. We also cover three AI-related career roles that do not involve coding.

We continue our theme on advancing your career in the era of AI. This week, we speak with another AI lead from a gigantic IT services firm: Cognizant. Bret Greenstein is Head of AI at Cognizant, and he talks about what folks who think about AI in terms of strategic direction, project management, etc., have in common. Brett also discusses how non-technical folks can think about AI in order to take on leadership roles in AI projects, including having a firm understanding of what is possible with AI in their industry.

This week, we speak with Sriram Ramanathan, CTO at Genpact, about what the important non-technical roles exist for making AI work in the enterprise. Everything from project management to quality control and beyond, Sriram lists out areas where nontechnical experts play a critical role in bringing AI to life.

If you're listening to this podcast, you at least have an interest in leveraging AI in the enterprise. But how do you take that interest and use it to move up in your company and advance your career? In this week's episode, we speak with Muriël Serrurier Schepper, who worked with AI at Rabobank and Shell managing advanced analytics projects. She now has her own AI consulting firm. Muriël speaks with us about her experience using her prior skillset to enter the world of AI, take the reigns of exciting AI projects, and open up more career opportunities for herself.