If Your Company Isn't Good at Analytics, It's Not Ready for AI

Management teams often assume they can leapfrog best practices for basic data analytics by going directly to adopting artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. But companies that rush into sophisticated artificial intelligence before reaching a critical mass of automated processes and structured analytics can end up paralyzed. They can become saddled with expensive start-up partnerships, impenetrable black-box systems, cumbersome cloud computational clusters, and open-source toolkits without programmers to write code for them. By contrast, companies with strong basic analytics -- such as sales data and market trends -- make breakthroughs in complex and critical areas after layering in artificial intelligence. For example, one telecommunications company we worked with can now predict with 75 times more accuracy whether its customers are about to bolt using machine learning.