Baidu's former chief scientist says companies need an AI strategy now VentureBeat AI

Five years from now, company leaders will be looking back and wishing they developed an artificial intelligence strategy sooner, according to one of the veterans of the field. Andrew Ng, the cofounder of Coursera and the former machine learning chief at Chinese tech powerhouse Baidu, said that he thinks Fortune 500 businesses will find the rise of AI similar to the rise of the internet. Some top CEOs bemoan how their businesses were late to the party when it came to competing on the internet, and Ng said that the same thing will be true when it comes to AI. In his view, businesses are best off hiring a leader with deep knowledge of the field who can help build up an organization's knowledge and capabilities in a centralized way. That chief AI officer, as he described it, would be charged with helping to bring expertise in the field to the rest of the a company.