It will likely take a decade or so until some AI technologies become the norm.
Enterprise teams are content to chew through budgets on the wrong things because they worry they won’t receive the same monies the next year if they don’t.
3 Signs Your Innovation Budget Needs a New Approach.
“Entrepreneurs and investors operate leanly. They know big-bang innovation rarely ever works. Instead, they take small, smart steps toward a solution without worrying about nitty-gritty features. In contrast, enterprise teams are content to chew through budgets on the wrong things because they worry they won’t receive the same monies the next year if they don’t. Talk about wasteful! See your product or service from a scrappy, entrepreneurial viewpoint. Don’t waste time on that obscure API or flashy layout. If users want it, they’ll tell you during the prototyping phase. Spend where your product provides value, and innovation will follow. Far too many firms don’t connect the dots between their budgetary input and innovation output. It’s not as simple as spending more money. The truth is, it’s about agile planning, frequent failure, and regular reallocation of resources. The sooner your innovation budget accounts for those things, the better your balance sheet will look.” BUSINESS.COM Emerson Taymor Image credit: lOvE lOvE/Shutterstock
Why Innovation Tends to Bypass Economics.
“Many of these problems can be traced back to a basic economic distinction: the difference between invention and innovation. Invention is defined as the discovery of a new exciting idea, product or approach. Innovation means applying that idea through changes in operating models and mindsets. Too many areas today contain the invention but not the innovation. This harmful decoupling is driven by a combination of biases, blind spots and inertia (knowing you need to do something different but ending up doing more of the same). In too many cases, the flaw has less to do with the need to come up with a brilliant idea, and more a matter of embracing it and adapting accordingly. That requires being curious, open-minded, willing to listen, open to experimentation, creating safe zones for candid discussions and learning from failure. Economics has persistently failed to address this fundamental — and solvable — problem. The gaps between inventions and innovations have led to too many foregone welfare-enhancing opportunities for individuals, companies, governments and society.” newsmax.com Mohamed El-Erian Bloomberg View One Photo | Dreamstime.com
This Is How to Get Started With AI When the Only Thing You Know Is the Acronym.
“Autonomous AI, however, is capable of learning certain tasks that require complex decisions to be made. Autonomous AI often receives the most attention because it makes innovations like self-driving cars possible, but at least in the short term, the business world might have more use for AI’s organizational and triage capabilities. Whatever you choose to do with AI, don’t delay. “AI is going to revolutionize the world more than any other tech advancement of the past 30 years,” Mark Cuban remarked at the recent Upfront Summit in Los Angeles. Like the internet, AI will produce a rich-get-richer environment, and those who get a head start are going to run the table.” So far, the following areas of AI show particular business promise: 1. Predictive analytics. 2. Computer vision. 3. Natural language processing.” entrepreneur.com Sourav Dey Image credit: Photographer is my life | Getty Images
AI and the Future of Work.
“It will likely take a decade or so until some AI technologies become the norm. While that provides plenty of lead time for the transition, few companies are taking action now to train their workers. Another little-noticed problem is that the AI systems themselves are being created with data and algorithms that don’t reflect the diverse American society. Accenture research shows business leaders don’t think that their workers are ready for AI. But only 3% of those leaders were reinvesting in training. At a Davos meeting held by Accenture, Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor at Stanford University and director of the school’s AI lab, suggested using AI to retrain workers. “I think there’s a really exciting possibility that machine learning itself would help us to learn in more effective ways and to re-skill workers in more effective ways,” she said. ‘And I personally would like to see more investment and thought going into that aspect.‘” wired.com/wiredinsider/ WIRED Brand Lab for Accenture. GETTY IMAGES
A Simple Tool to Start Making Decisions with the Help of AI.
“Clarifying these seven factors for each critical decision throughout your organization will help you get started on identifying opportunities for AIs to either reduce costs or enhance performance. Here we discussed a decision associated with a specific situation. To get started with AI, your challenge is to identify the key decisions in your organization where the outcome hinges on uncertainty. Filling out the AI Canvas won’t tell you whether you should make your own AI or buy one from a vendor, but it will help you clarify what the AI will contribute (the prediction), how it will interface with humans (judgment), how it will be used to influence decisions (action), how you will measure success (outcome), and the types of data that will be required to train, operate, and improve the AI.” hbr.org Ajay AgrawalJoshua GansAvi Goldfarb MARTIN HOLSTE/EYEEM/ GETTY IMAGES
Physicists Just Discovered an Entirely New Type of Superconductivity: No one thought this was possible in solid materials.
“One of the ultimate goals of modern physics is to unlock the power of superconductivity, where electricity flows with zero resistance at room temperature. What they found was odd – as the material warmed up from absolute zero, the amount that a magnetic field could penetrate the material increased linearly instead of exponentially, which is what is normally seen with superconductors. After running a series of measurements and calculations, the researched concluded that the best explanation for what was going on was that the electrons must have been disguised as particles with higher spin – something that wasn’t even considered as a possibility for a superconductor before. While this new type of superconductivity still requires incredibly cold temperatures for now, the discovery gives the entire field a whole new direction.” sciencealert.com FIONA MACDONALD (Emily Edwards, University of Maryland)
Australian Scientists Just Solved One Of The Biggest Quantum Computing Challenges Using Material Found In DVDs.
“In quantum technology, information is carried on quibits, single photons. For the quibits to be actually useful in quantum technologies, though, they need to be produced by Single Photon Emitters that work at room temperature (it’s just practical, really) and at telecom wavelength (the most efficient way to transfer information via optical fibres) all at once. It wasn’t easy, but they’ve done it. Those plucky Australian Scientists have gone and done it. And they did it using a material found in DVDs.” www.gizmodo.com.au Rae Johnston Image: NASA
Feynman 100.
”’Dick Feynman relished the pleasure of finding things out, and he had a remarkable knack for conveying the excitement of science to a general audience,’ says John P. Preskill, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. ‘We hope this event will capture some of that boundless curiosity and sense of fun that made Feynman such a treasured colleague.’ The event will be divided into two days, with an evening celebration on Friday, May 11, and a scientific symposium during the day on Saturday, May 12.” http://m.caltech.edu/news/remembering-richard-feynman-81875 Credit: Caltech Archives Whitney Clavin
Einstein and the Quantum.
“The notion of an underlying quantum probability proved to be too much for Einstein (and Schrödinger as well), who would now turn his back on the new quantum mechanics forever to pursue his dream of a causal unified field theory. In the end, Einstein would never realize this final dream, and the “strangeness” of quantum mechanics continues with us today.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/einstein-and-the-quantum Credit: Getty Images Scott Bembenek.
Steps:
(19) Anticipate the growing shifts in life and business. Nobody wants to swim upstream if the current is moving everything in the opposite direction.