Demystifying AI via Top 10 Key Takeaways of "Unscaled" by Hemant Taneja
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The document summarizes the key takeaways from Hemant Taneja's book 'Unscaled', emphasizing the transformative power of AI in modern business. It highlights essential insights such as AI's ability to personalize services at scale, the critical importance of data, and the need for companies to adapt to AI-driven environments. The text advocates for a shift in focus towards uniquely human skills to thrive alongside AI advancements.
Demystifying AI via Top 10 Key Takeaways of "Unscaled" by Hemant Taneja
- 3. 3 “Unscaled” Top 10 Key Takeaways “ D a t a i s t h e r a w f u e l , A I t r a n s f o r m s i t i n t o s o m e t h i n g u s e f u l a n d a c c e s s i b l e ” “ A I a u t o m a t e s l e a r n i n g a n d c u s t o m i z a t i o n f o r m a r k e t s o f 1 , a t s c a l e ” “ A I i s t h i s c e n t u r y ’ s e l e c t r i c i t y ” ” W e ’ v e g o n e f r o m ‘ S o f t w a r e e a t i n g t h e w o r l d ’ t o ‘ E v e r y t h i n g i s i n g e s t i n g s o f t w a r e ’ ” “ S o m u c h o f w h a t w e n o w d o c r e a t e s d a t a ” 5 4 3 2 1
- 4. 4 “Unscaled” Top 10 Key Takeaways “ A m a z o n ’ s ‘ D a y 1 ’ d o c t r i n e i s a g o o d n o r t h s t a r f o r F 1 0 0 0 c o m p a n i e s ” “ W h a t h a p p e n s w h e n y o u r f i n a n c e s a r e s e l f - d r i v i n g ? ” “ T h e ‘ t e c h i s a l l h e r e ’ ” 10 “ F o c u s o n ‘ s u p e r h u m a n ’ s t u f f t o a v o i d p e n d i n g A I a u t o m a t i o n ” “ T h e q u a l i t y o f y o u r f e e d b a c k l o o p i s c r i t i c a l a k a s p e e d k i l l s ” 9 8 7 6
- 5. 5 “AI is this century ’s electricity.” “We went through a similarly grand revolution in the early twentieth century when the telegraph, telephone, television, automobile, airplane and mass electrification vaulted the planet from a slow and local way of life to one that is fast and global. No one who lived in the late 1800s would have recognized the world of the 1920s.” “Economist Carlota Perez describes the impact of such revolutions in her influential book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: ‘When a technological revolution irrupts in the scene, it does not just add some dynamic new industries to the previous production structure. It provides the means for modernizing all the existing industries and activities.’” 1 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 1 8 )
- 6. 6 “AI automates learning and customization for markets of 1, at scale.” “AI allows the profitable customization of everything – because AI can automate customization. Think about it: people have always had products and services tailored just to them, but if humans need to do the tailoring, it takes a great deal of time and labor.” “So custom-made products or a personalized service like having your own driver can only be offered profitably if they cost a lot – too much for mass market customers to afford. Mechanized factories pay off because they can make a lot of the exact same item quickly and cheaply.” “But AI is different: AI automates learning about each individual customer or user, and then software can automatically tailor a product or service to them.” 2 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 3 3 - 3 4 )
- 7. 7 “Data is the raw fuel, AI transforms it into something useful and accessible.” “All this IoT activity is generating enormous amounts of data about energy usage – information no one ever had before. These insights will play an important role in unscaling. Just as data about retail transactions or social networks has helped entrepreneurs customize products and target small units of demand, the same will happen in energy. The data will guide innovators to new markets and new kinds of products in energy.” “Because AI is software that can learn, an AI system can take in data about you, get to know you, and identify patterns in your health. As more information comes in – say, from IoT devices monitoring your heart rate or blood glucose – AI software can look for changes that suggest you might be getting sick. The system will catch illness early, when they’re easier to treat.” 3 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 6 4 + 8 2 )
- 8. 8 “So much of what we now do creates data.” “On a phone you can download apps that connect through a nearly ubiquitous high- speed wireless network to powerful software hosted in a data center somewhere. Those apps deliver social networking, chat, email, shopping, media, and services such as Uber or AirBnB. Super-accurate GPS maps guide you anywhere. The phone can hold your music and books. It can let you watch live sports. Enterprise apps from companies such as Salesforce.com allow you to do your job from a phone screen almost anywhere in the world. Mobile content, community, and commerce have quickly become a way of life. We can’t imagine getting through the day without this technology. How strange to think that just a decade before, none of this was possible.” “So we spent a decade connecting people and moving a great deal of our activities online, where every action generates data. Then, in recent years, industry jacked up the planetwide data-generation machine by implementing the Internet of Things (IoT), which puts “things”, not just people on the global network. Those things might be video cameras or heat sensors, FitBit health monitors or GPS tags on endangered animals. According to analyst firm IDC, there were already 9 billion connected devices in place in 2015, but that will grow to 30 billion by 2020 and 80 billion by 2025.” 4 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 2 9 )
- 9. 9 “We’ve gone from ‘Software eating the world’ to ‘Everything is ingesting software.’” “But in the 2010s and beyond, the world is eating software – everything is ingesting software, becoming smart and connecting to the global internet.” “The IoT explosion will give us an astonishing flow of data, opening possibilities for AI to conduct deep analysis of how the world works. IoT is giving us instant, real-time views, as if we are hooking up the planet to an EKG and watching its heart beat.” “AI is all about discerning patterns in data, predicting behaviors, and deciding on actions. With little data coming in, AI is like a baby’s brain – all the smarts are in place, but it has too little knowledge of the world to understand what’s going on or to know that, say, pulling the cat’s tail will get you scratched.” So, like a brain, as AI gets exposed to greater amounts of data, it can see patterns and predict behaviors with greater accuracy. The more data coming in, the better AI gets.” 5 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 3 0 - 3 1 )
- 10. 10 “ The quality of your feedback loop is critical aka speed kills.” “’We feel like it has a strong potential to address the problem of physician burnout and the challenge of being mired in data and not actually having synthesized knowledge,’ says William Morris, the Cleveland Clinic’s associate chief information officer.” “Over time, AI systems such as Watson will be able to get to know patients while constantly reading and learning more about medicine, leading to better and better answers for the doctors who consult with it. Anyone running a modern hospital will be charged with figuring out how to make data course through the hallways and operating rooms and how to turn that data into better care.” “‘As a computer science guy, I see that the way doctors operate today is like expert- systems software,’ Color’s Laraki says. ’They rely on a decision tree that we make simple enough to fit into the average smart person’s brain. We load it up in medical school. But later, its decisions are based on a limited set of inputs and complexity.’ The opportunity and upside now is that the doctor, working hand in hand with AI-driven systems, will be able to access a level of data and medical knowledge that would never fit inside one person’s head. ‘The doctor becomes less like someone using a rare superpower and more like a data practitioner,’ Laraki says.” 6 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 3 0 - 3 1 )
- 11. 11 “What happens when your finances are ‘self-driving ’”? “Bloch believes Digit will be a net benefit to individuals and even to society as a whole. ‘What happens when your finances are self-driving?’ he notes. For one thing, people with Digit avoid overdraft and late fees, each adding up to around $20 billion a year in revenue for banks – most of it paid by those who can least afford it.” “‘Think about the mental productivity lost by trying to figure out which bill to pay and how much, and how to make this other payment, and realizing you missed a payment,’ Bloch says. ‘All of that can be gone because everything’s getting paid at the right time for the right amount. What happens to all that mental productivity we’ll be given back? We’d already be on Mars if we had that!’” 7 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 1 1 1 )
- 12. 12 “ The ‘tech is all here’” “That’s not to say every corporation must become a platform or perish. But a successful platform strategy looks like a path to growth in the unscaled era. Platforms can be enormously profitable and enduring because a whole ecosystem of companies comes to depend on the platform for their success.” “This is why the AWS cloud platform has become the profit engine for Amazon, with operating margins of 23.5 percent, compared to about 3.5 percent for the Amazon retail business.” 8 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 1 7 7 )
- 13. 13 “Amazon’s ‘Day 1’ doctrine is a good northstar for F1000 companies.” “In early 2017 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos published a letter to shareholders about a concept he called ‘Day 1.’ As he wrote, ‘I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple decades’ – which is nearly the entire time Amazon has been in existence.” “Day 1, Bezos wrote, is about constantly creating new, nimble, product-focused businesses inside Amazon – businesses that can be quickly built on top of Amazon’s corporate platform and feel like they are in the first day of life. To Bezos, Day 2 is when a business gets bogged down inside its own scale.” “He offered four points that he considers a ’starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense.’ The first is ‘true customer obsession.’ In this unscaled era the products that win make you feel like a market of one. Bezos second tactic is ‘resist proxies.’ Scaled companies can get lost managing things that don’t matter. One example is process. His third point: ‘embrace external trends.’ As Bezos notes, ‘The big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace.’ The final Day 1 point is about ‘high-velocity decision making.’ Executives feel they need a ton of input and information before making a decision. All that leads to stagnation and the onset of Day 2.” 9 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 )
- 14. 14 “Focus on ‘super human’ stuff to avoid pending AI automation.” “Successful people in the AI century will focus on work that takes advantage of unique human strengths, like social interaction, creative thinking, decision making with complex inputs, empathy, and questioning. AI cannot think about data it doesn’t have; it predicts what you want to see on Facebook based on what you’ve already liked. It can’t predict that you might like something that’s entirely out of left field – something that seems incongruous with your past patterns. Only humans can think that creatively. As author Kevin Kelly says, the most valuable people in an age of push-button answers will be those that ask the most interesting questions.” “AI’s proponents say it will collaborate with us, not compete against us. So I believe the most successful, influential people of the next twenty years will be those who understand how to partner with AI. The technology can seem scary, but it is the most powerful tool humanity has ever built.” “This is my chief career advice to anyone: learn how to use AI to help you accomplish your dreams.” 10 - “ U n s c a l e d ” ( p g . 1 9 1 - 1 9 2 )