15 Common AI Mistakes to Avoid: Ensure a Smooth AI Journey
Artificial intelligence offers endless benefits to a business but can be overwhelming to implement without proper guidance and support. Here, we’ll discuss the common errors enterprises make in AI implementation along with the ways to avoid them. Artificial intelligence has been a part of the global market for years. While it has several definitions, AI is mainly the science and engineering of making machines intelligent. It combines computer science and datasets to enable quicker problem-solving. Many SMBs, MSMEs, and large enterprises are adopting AI technology and tools for various purposes. A research report shows 44% of companies in the private sector will adopt AI in 2023. According to Statista, AI is mainly used for managing data as a business asset, establishing data culture, driving innovation, performing data analytics, and building a data-driven enterprise. However, several business organizations have suffered from artificial intelligence failures. In fact, various studies show that 70% of companies have minimal or no impact of AI, and a whopping 87% of data science projects don’t make it to production. In a way, AI mishaps are one of the reasons for organizations to be wary of adopting advanced technology for digital transformation. For example, the automated hiring algorithm used by Amazon turned out to be biased against women and hired only white men (due to biased training data). A real estate tycoon in Hong Kong filed a lawsuit against a business that sold him an AI robot to manage his funds. The robot lost around $20 million every day instead of increasing the funds by making the right investment decisions. It’s crucial to understand where things go wrong and avoid such mistakes to successfully implement AI technology in a business. In this blog, we’ll read about the common AI mistakes every business should avoid and ways to achieve the desired results. What are the Most Common AI Mistakes to Avoid? 1. Half-Hearted Attempts Artificial intelligence can offer a multitude of benefits to a business. However, it requires heavy investment in building a strong IT infrastructure and training employees to work with the latest tools. Making half-hearted attempts or investing in AI for the sake of it is a sure way to generate losses. AI adoption requires planning, implementation, and continuous tracking to deliver results. Haphazard processes will only waste business resources and lead to additional complications. To prevent such issues, businesses should take the time to develop a strategy for AI adoption and follow it. 2. Lack of Data Quality Is your data large enough to make AI effective? This is one question many people ask since AI is associated with large datasets. However, businesses forget to consider data quality and its impact on artificial intelligence. The AI model is as good as the data used to train it. If businesses don’t provide high-quality data input, the model will not deliver accurate results. Lack of data quality is another major reason for AI failure in enterprises. This can be avoided by investing in proper data systems and ETL (extract, transform, load) models to collect, clean, format, and process the data before it is fed into AI models for training. Data management is necessary to avoid skewed or incorrect models. 3. Unclear Business Goals Why should a business invest in AI? What problems does the top management wish to solve using artificial intelligence? Which business goals can be achieved through AI adoption? Every enterprise should have clear answers to such questions before investing in AI. Simply copying a competitor is likely to result in failure. Establish definite and measurable business goals. Align these goals with the business vision and mission. Then create an AI adoption strategy that supports the business goals and objectives. Evaluate the impact the AI model would have on the establishment and calculate the expected ROI. The trick to avoiding AI failure is to spend more time strengthening the foundation instead of building AI on weak bases. 4. Not Focusing on Change Management AI adoption requires many changes across the organization. The internal processes, IT systems, employee working methodologies, and organizational culture have to be changed and revamped to align with how AI systems work. Quite a few businesses don’t pay enough attention to these changes. They don’t have a comprehensive plan to implement the changes cohesively at each level. This results in disruptions, miscommunication, delays, and unexpected losses. Companies offering AI consulting services insist on developing a change management strategy to ensure employees, management, systems, and processes are in sync and work towards the same goals. It’s vital to address the cultural and behavioral aspects of AI adoption to overcome roadblocks and ensure a smoother transition from outdated methods to the latest ones. 5. Relying on Black Box Models AI models are complex and hard to understand. There’s no denying this statement. However, when a business relies on such black box models (ones that offer almost no explanation of how the algorithms work), it creates opacity in the enterprise. Lack of transparency and accountability can lead to many issues for the business. Who will be responsible for the wrong insights? Avoid using black-box AI models in the organization. Work towards building transparent models and maintaining clear documentation to understand how things are done. Businesses that cannot afford to build AI models from scratch can partner with AI companies to customize existing tools and increase transparency. Put in extra effort to explain the process to employees and establish procedures that make people accountable. 6. Not Enough Expertise Introducing artificial intelligence in a business is no small task. AI models are best handled by experts with the necessary domain knowledge. Asking the existing talent pool to use AI technology without proper training is likely to cause errors and additional problems. When planning the digital transformation of a business, it’s important to identify the talent gap and find ways to fill it. Organizations can hire an in-house team of AI experts to initiate the process or rely on offshore service providers. Building a team from scratch is cost-intensive and time-consuming. However, working with AI companies is quicker, cheaper, and more effective.
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