Operationalising AI in business

20 June 2024

I attended a Milton Keynes Business Leaders Partnership breakfast event this week, where Jack Lawton, Data Science Principal Consultant at Aiimi, spoke about ‘Operationalising AI in Business’. In other words, how best to apply AI in processes and services.

There are countless views on how AI is impacting our lives and businesses, now and in the future, but finding trustworthy, useful advice is challenging. How do you know what’s genuine knowledge and what’s opinion – or whether the source is simply jumping on the AI bandwagon?

Thankfully, having seen Jack talk several times before, I know that his information is based on data (obviously), experience and real knowledge . He’s worth listening to on the subject, as is everyone at Aiimi.

I mention all of this because, with so much hype around regenerative AI, finding the real nuggets of information can be difficult. That’s not surprising, given the amazing things that the tool can deliver, which has inspired all and sundry to offer advice. It’s a shame though, when we’re all looking to embed the technology into our own systems and processes and need clarity on how best to do that.

Jack was keen to reiterate the old maxim of ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ when discussing the importance of quality input for any computer-based system. The data you’re searching to find the required answer must be the right data, and it’s much more effective if it has been indexed and stored efficiently to expedite retrieval.

Use the AI tool within a gated community to ensure that you’re utilising the right restricted data set to find the answer you’re seeking.  That can also mean that your data remains private – though the only way to ensure that privacy is to use a gated community that’s not connected to the internet.

There was much more, and you can check it out for yourself with Aiimi’s latest guide, ‘AI in Business; goals, roles and the future’ which you can download here.

As an example of the confusion that’s ripe with AI, I’ve recently been particularly excited about the use of the AI tool, Perplexity. Its CEO Aravind Srinivas once described it as the ‘child of Wikipedia’ and ChatGPT’, and I’ve enjoyed using it.

The publication ‘Wired’ then came out with this article. If you haven’t time to read it, Wired essentially referred to Perplexity as a ‘Bullshit Machine’.  Apparently, Forbes has reportedly accused it of stealing content, scraping data from unauthorised sources, and fabricating information ‘out of  thin air’. Don’t forget that this ‘Bullshit Machine’ was recently valued at a billion dollars…

The key takeaway is to keep researching and asking questions of trusted experts – which of course is common sense and applies to any subject where you have limited knowledge.

Thank heavens that in Milton Keynes we have businesses like Aiimi. with leaders like Jack Lawton, I say.

Bryan