At our recent CoLab Day event, Parinaz Sobhani, Georgian’s Head of Applied Research, hosted a session with special guest Zahi Karam, Vice President of Data Science, Bluecore and two Georgian Applied Research Scientists — Azin Asgarian and Akshay Budhkar — to share their insights to help CoLab companies with their machine learning and artificial intelligence challenges and identify new opportunities.
Where to Start Your AI or ML Journey
We began the session by asking where a company should start their AI or ML journeys.
My advice is don’t start with data science.
For companies that aren’t AI-first, but want to incorporate AI and ML to improve their customer experience and use it for differentiation, one lesson from Bluecore is to not start with data science. In many cases, companies are able to build extreme value with just heuristics (rule-based technique) — no machine learning required. So once the business is ready to start building out a data science team, they have already created the data foundation and are able to build on top of that.
In the beginning, the main priority is the data pipeline and capturing as much data as possible. Focus more on how you structure the data and how you collect it because you don’t yet know what data is going to be most useful.
When you start building your first model, start with the simplest thing that you can package in a proof-of-concept with one or two clients before you invest in building out the full (Read more...)