The AI in Business Podcast

As it turns out, often times terms like predictive analytics and data science are used incorrectly. By the end of this podcast, you'll have greater clarity on five potentially vague AI and data science terms that are sometimes overused in conversations about AI in the enterprise. This week, I introduce you to German Sanches, who focused his PhD on NLP and has done a lot of AI work in business. He also helps us with our research projects. This episode is all about addressing use-cases in reference to five terms that a lot of folks get wrong.

This week, we interview Arnab Kumar, Founding Manager, Frontier Technologies for the NITI Aayog, the wing of the Indian government focused on rolling out AI into areas like healthcare and agriculture. In this episode, we talk about critical factors for applying AI at the national level, such as where to begin applying AI and what the low-hanging fruit is for gaining traction, leverage, and data assets that are going to transfer elsewhere. We also talk about how governments, much like enterprises, need a future vision for critical capabilities they're going to enable with AI. Finally, Kumar discusses what he thinks are the most transferable lessons for the enterprise from his experience building out a national AI strategy.

Erin Knealy is the portfolio manager of the cybersecurity division of the Us Department of Homeland Security. She is the interface between the US government and the startup and tech ecosystems. We speak with her about transferable lessons from the AI use-cases in the public sector into the private sector. How does an existing organization pick the right first AI project? How should look through a lens of opportunity when it comes to AI? In this episode, we discuss how these lessons learned in the public sector can apply to the private sector.

It's curious to see how much more there is of sensor tech and internet of things than there was 18 months ago. This week, we speak with Cormac Driver, PhD and Head of Product Engineering at Temboo, an IoT vendor. We talk about how to spot AI and IoT opportunity where sensors and equipment in the physical world can actually deliver ROI and drive value for an enterprise. In addition, Cormac discusses how to get the most out of an IoT project and what's involved in terms of data and infrastructure. Finally, I ask Cormac in what sector IoT will become ubiquitous first.

There's an entire artificial intelligence ecosystem for enterprise search. Most of this is in a purely digital world. Most vendors help with a layer of AI-enabled search that understands terms or phrases and is able to return the results or answers to questions that someone types in. But the problem is compounded when it comes to searching the physical world. That is the topic of this week's episode of AI in Industry. Our guest is Anke Conzelmann, Director of Product Management at Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain is a four-billion-dollar physical and digital storage company based in the Boston area. They handle the records of some of the largest financial, health care, and retail brands around the world. Conzelmann speaks with us about the future potential of artificial intelligence for search within an enterprise, not just of digital files, but across formats.

The AI in Industry podcast is all about transferrable lessons. Today we speak with Andrew Byrnes, an investment director at Comet Labs in San Francisco about the competitive edge with AI. What does it look like when companies adopt AI in a way that gives them a competitive advantage? Byrnes breaks down the idea into two categories: automation and augmentation.

We did a lot of focus on healthcare for the World Bank, and we presented a lot of that research in South Africa. When I was there, I interviewed DataProft cofounder Frans Cronje about the intersection of AI and manufacturing. We talk about what's possible with AI in manufacturing today and just how instrumented and challenging it is to add a layer of AI insight into a manufacturing environment. This is much harder than a lot of other domains where data is maybe more accessible, and in some cases it's also higher risk.

This week we speak with founder and CEO of Aidoc, Elad Walach, about the challenges of adopting AI to become part of a workflow in healthcare. We speak to him about what it is that makes it so challenging to get these tools to become part of the process of treating patients.

This week, we speak with arguably one of the best-known folks in the domain of neural networks: Jurgen Schmidhuber. He's working on a lot of different applications now in heavy industry, self-driving cars, and other spaces. We talk to him about the future of manufacturing and more broadly, how machines and robots learn. Schmidhuber uses the analogy of a baby learning about the world around it. He has a lot of interesting perspectives on how the general progression of making machines more intelligent will affect other industries outside of where AI is arguably best known today: consumer tech and advertising. If you're in the manufacturing space, this will be an interesting interview to tune into. If you're just interested in what the next phase in AI might be like, I think Schmidhuber actually frames it pretty succinctly.

The AI In Industry podcast is often conducted over Skype, and this week's guest happens to be one of its early developers. Jaan Tallinn is recognized as sort of one of the technical leads behind Skype as a platform. I met Jaan while we were both doing round table sessions at the World Government Summit, and in this episode, I talk to Tallinn about a topic that we often don't get to cover on the podcast: the consequences of artificial general intelligence. Where's this going to take humanity in the next hundred years?