As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent a lot of 2017 going back to math fundamentals as part of my quest to better understand where AI is going.
I have increasing confidence in my thesis that AI is going to impact the tech industry as significantly as the web did. Furthermore, while learning about HTML, HTTP, and WWW in 1995 was accessible to new users who had access to a modem and a PC, AI is a little different. In order to engage with AI productively, one needs to learn some undergraduate math.
Here are two observations that support my thought that businesspeople–not just engineers or technical leaders–need better grounding in math in order to evaluate and use AI effectively.
First, in the most recent version of their Machine Intelligence Landscape from 2016, Shivon Zilis and my friend James Cham write:
Other companies are struggling to figure out what to do, as many boardrooms did on “what to do about the Internet” in 1997. Why is this so difficult for companies to wrap their heads around? Machine intelligence is different from traditional software. …The idea of this new machine trust is daunting and makes machine intelligence harder to adopt than traditional software. We’ve had a few people tell us that the biggest predictor of whether a company will successfully adopt machine intelligence is whether they have a C-Suite executive with an advanced math degree. These executives understand it isn’t magic—it is just (hard) math.
Of course, this is just anecdotal but still very interesting given a little AI math project I’ve been working on. I also argue that although the math goes beyond first-year calculus, it’s involved but not necessarily super-hard—given the right teacher!
Second, Harvard Business Review just published this article yesterday. It summarizes a study of 3,000 executives to describe what is and isn’t working as businesses experiment with and adopt AI:
Without support from leadership, your AI transformation might not succeed. Successful AI adopters have strong executive leadership support for the new technology. Survey respondents from firms that have successfully deployed an AI technology at scale tend to rate C-suite support as being nearly twice as high as those companies that have not adopted any AI technology. They add that strong support comes not only from the CEO and IT executives but also from all other C-level officers and the board of directors.
As I’ve been saying for a few months now, it’s probably best if more and more non-tech C-level execs learn some more math.