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Or maybe you’re just getting started on your first one. Whatever the case may be,
it’s important to recognize that – even though they can provide great value – AI
initiatives (https://www.phdata.io/blog/how-to-implement-ai-strategy/) require
a certain amount of diligence.
If you have already struggled, you should give yourself some grace, because even
Google Research has called machine learning “the high-interest credit card of
technical debt.”
AI initiatives fail for a plethora of reasons. But with a bit of foresight, failures can be
avoided. In this article, I’m going to outline some of the problems that I’ve seen and
hopefully lay out a path for you to avoid becoming part of a failed AI project.
1. You Don’t Have the Right Data Available
(https://www.phdata.io)
Have you ever tried to bake a cake without a pan? Or change a tire without one of
those turner thingies?
For instance, maybe a particular column is missing data or has a strange value
associated with it instead of the desired clarity needed to build a model. Data
Quality is a necessary component of deploying a successful ML model
(https://www.phdata.io/blog/the-ultimate-mlops-guide-how-to-deploy-ml-
models-to-production/). These techniques are usually set up on the data
engineering (https://www.phdata.io/data-engineering/) side of the projects.
Yup, but not all will work for every use case.
For example, if you know customers are leaving your platform but you’re not saving
the right behavioral data to your data warehouse, then we really can’t build a
model that predicts customer churn. Data scientists will try to hunt and find some
speck of meaning to feed the model but that’s not what builds the most successful
outcomes. We can try to mock-up certain metrics to fill the data in, but “your results
may vary.”
One way that may help you prevent this problem is to give them access to all of
your data and tell your data scientist to come back with a list of any missing data
they think is necessary. Sometimes, it’s actually there but being stored in an
unexpected place.
And other times you will have to hire a data engineer or API specialist to start
collecting the right data so that you can have a successful AI project
(https://www.phdata.io/blog/how-to-implement-ai-strategy/).
It’s a science.
(https://www.phdata.io)
There’s a lot of experimentation involved and we don’t know when the experiment
may have a successful end.
With that being said, if your team isn’t setting and sticking to a measure of success,
then your team is living on the wild side. You’ll never know if something was
achieved or not.
A metric for success removes a lot of ambiguity for data science projects. The DS
team knows what they are working toward and you can also hold them
accountable for doing more research and finding new ideas in that direction.
It’s easier to make a list of techniques to try and test in a single direction than to just
be thinking of all the techniques that have ever been created to solve the
ambiguous problem.
Take deep learning for example. It has many great use cases. However, in many
business use cases, it’s simply too much. It sounds fancy. The VCs love it and it
makes us look cool but it’s probably not the most effective way to solve a problem.
Not only that but it’s not easy to know why deep learning
(https://www.phdata.io/blog/deploying-an-emotion-classification-system-for-
videos-with-deep-learning/) algorithms make decisions. In other words, they can
be a bit of a black box. If you don’t want to work with a black box, or if you have to
comply with any form of regulation. A deep learning technique
(https://www.phdata.io/blog/techniques-for-labeling-data-in-machine-
learning/) may not be viable.
A prototype helps you to know what the expected output from the model needs to
look like. Oftentimes, we have one idea in our heads and the business has another.
By starting with a prototype’s expected output, we can merge these two ideas.
This can be a dashboard that needs to be viewed by managers or the sales team.
It can be how a feature will be displayed in an application. It can be how the
customer will interact with it on their end or simply how it needs to feed into the
email automation system.
None of these has to be fully built out, but the visual will create another opportunity
to ensure all stakeholders are on the same page.
Our sincere hope is that this blog provided some insights to help your AI initiatives
find success. If you have any questions or could use a little guidance, our team of AI
experts are happy to jump in and help.
More to explore
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