Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) provides companies with a unique and enduring competitive advantage, witnessed by the fact that AI-first companies are the world's only trillion-dollar companies. "AI is the one that compounds most quickly and is the hardest to catch up to. Once you build it, it becomes a loop and it builds itself which is why it is so powerful," he tells The Irish Times. Think rope traps and spears, tools that allowed us to go beyond our immediate physical reach to gather more food than we could with our bare hands. However, this physical leverage was limited by scale and our intellectual capacity.

Title: The AI-First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence Author: Ash Fontana Published: 2021 by Portfolio / Penguin What It Teaches: Ash Fontana is a managing director of Zetta Venture Partners, an investment fund focused on AI. He draws upon the lessons he's learned through the companies he's invested in and worked with to share a very broad array of observations about how companies should think about, leverage, and manage data and artificial intelligence. He introduces a new concept, data learning effects, as the driving value creator in what I call the Connected Intelligence age. When To Use It: In the book's conclusion, Fontana describes the contents of The AI-First Company as "fresh data" that leaders can "process" and combine with other inputs as they iteratively create reinforcing learning loops that enable them to create their own competitive advantage. As such, the broad array of information in the book shouldn't be viewed as perfect or a step-by-step roadmap for building a winning AI-led strategy, but rather one input among others that can help inform your strategy, if appropriately filtered and evaluated.

Artificial Intelligence is already part of our lives in the tools and services we use every day. As AI development accelerates, how can authors and small businesses use it as leverage to expand income and opportunities? Ash Fontana gives some ideas in this interview on The AI-First Company.

Ash Fontana, Managing Partner, Zetta Venture PartnersUber's cars are crashing, Microsoft's bots abusing people on twitter and U.S. judges sentencing people using biased algorithms. Machine learning models rely on probabilistic assumptions because they're trying to model things that are uncertain. Probabilistic assumptions don't always hold, so the models don't always work. We should keep this in mind when building machine learning products so that we meet the expectations of our customers, at best, and avoid the unchecked use of machine learning in high-stakes situations, at worst. As a venture capital firm focused on intelligent software for the enterprise, we at Zetta Venture Partners have developed a framework for understanding the impact of products built on machine learning.