1 Exercise: Project Progress - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->All right, you don't get to just listen</v> to me all the time. You're gonna have to do some work. Now, what work are we gonna have you do? Well, we're gonna have you do a course project. Now, look, I can't make you do the course project, but I'm gonna really encourage you to. Why? Well, because you're gonna learn a lot more that way. Because think about it. If I just talk to you, you'll hear some of it. Maybe you'll take notes. But I mean, most of what I say you're gonna forget. But if I make you do a project, if you actually pick something to do where you're trying to implement all the things you're learning, that's gonna really cement it for you. You're gonna find there were certain things I said that you didn't quite understand that you had to kind of hear again. Maybe you needed to ask some questions. Maybe you needed to do some research. And you're gonna do all of that because you're motivated by the project that you pick. And because I want you to be motivated, we're gonna have you pick what your project is. Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to come up with an AI strategy for an organization of your choice. So it could be for how to solve a problem. It could be for how to introduce AI into your organization. But something that requires a strategy, something that's gonna cause you to actually think through the steps that we have on this slide. And so let's look at what those steps are. So the first thing you're gonna do is describe where you are. What is the current situation? How can you describe what the problem is, or where your organization is in its adoption of AI? It depends on what problem you choose, what the description would look like. But you start by setting a baseline and saying here's where we are. Next, what you do is you envision where you want to be. So what would things look like when the problem is solved? That's what we want you to do. Third, you have to assess what can stop you. So what are the things that could get in the way of this grand vision you just came up with? Now, one of the things I have to tell you is that I usually find that people tend not to be strong at both envisioning and assessing what can stop them. You might be better at one or the other. Maybe you're more of a visionary type where you can paint big vistas and really think about what the future would look like. But then you get so excited about your vision that it's really hard for you to be practical and realize all the things that could get in the way, all those obstacles that would stop you from reaching that vision. Or maybe you're more of a practical person. You're somebody who can see the holes in every plan. Every time comes up with an idea, you can tick off the five things that they didn't think about that we're gonna have to address in order to make that vision a reality. And here's the thing. It could be that you don't like working with each other. So the visionary finds the practical person to be kind of a naysayer, never on board with what the big picture is, always talking about what's gonna go wrong and kind of a Debbie Downer. And maybe the practical person says, hey, you know, that's great, but you know, these visionary people, I'd fall over dead of a nickel rolled in under the door based on any of the ideas they ever came up with. They're where the rubber meets the sky. I mean, those people never finish anything. And so if you really have trouble working with the other kind of person, you got to really cultivate that because you need each other. So you might find that it'd be good to run your strategy by whoever's the opposite kind of person from you and have them help you either make a better vision or help you identify more obstacles. And here's why. Unless you have a really strong vision for where you're going, and you've also identified all of the obstacles that could prevent you from getting there, there's no way to put together a plan. And that's what you really need to do. You need to have a plan because you know what your plan is, it is how you're going to get to your vision by overcoming all of the obstacles. And so that's really where you want to go. So this is what your course project is. You are going to create a plan to develop an AI strategy or solve an AI problem in your organization. So how do we get started? Well first, decide the organization. Now it could be where you work now. And that would be just fine. In fact, that might be really recommended, because you want to pick a problem that you really know well. So pick an organization that you know. It could be a place you'd like to work or a place you used to work. It could be a nonprofit that you volunteer for. It could be a business that you'd like to start. But in any event, what you have to do is pick an organization that you know pretty well. Now, if you choose a really large organization, you might want to choose some kind of geographic region, just so you make the scope manageable. So instead of solving the problem for the entire global corporation, maybe you only solve it for one country. So try and reduce the scope of it to something that you can really handle. Now, you optionally could choose a product or a service that company makes and pick something that you know a lot about. So depending on how big the organization is, maybe there's a product line or a service line that you want to limit it to. Make sure it's something you're very familiar with and should be some type of area where you want to improve the use of AI and try to pick the smallest scope you can while still making it worthwhile to solve the problem. You can always make the solution bigger and scale it once you've got something that's working. Now, anything you can do to narrow the scope is probably a good idea because your goal is to learn how to use AI, not to solve the world's biggest problem. If you try to boil the ocean, you're just gonna end up frustrated. So what I want you to do is to try and pick a problem that's manageable enough in size that you can really bite it off. Next what I want you to do is picture who the person is that you need to convince with your strategy. Who needs to approve it? So maybe it's your boss. Maybe you're consulted and you need to convince your client. It could be an investor because you're starting a company or maybe you're starting a company and you need to convince your spouse because he or she really isn't on board with this idea yet. But somebody, think about who this person is, that you're trying to convince. And what you want to do is develop your strategy to persuade that person. Now you're marketers, so you should be able to figure out how to do that. Next, pick the exact problem. It's not enough to just have a strategy because you have to have immediate tactical value as well. So choose some type of problem that you think AI can solve. So maybe you want to personalize content on your website, or maybe you want to predict who of the people who fill out the contact forms are gonna turn into the best leads, or maybe you want to make your site search something more than a random web page generator. Maybe people would actually find what they're looking for. Those are just three random examples of problems, but pick something that you think you can use AI for. Pick something that you haven't been able to solve with techniques that don't use AI and pick something that you think you have some data for. How would you pick up the data around this stuff? So think a little bit about what the problem is. Now guess what. If you pick the wrong problem or the wrong organization, it's okay, because if you get halfway through and you realize that you screwed up, just start it over again. Pick another one. No one's gonna check. So pick something and get started with it. If it ends up being wrong, then you'll do something else. It'll be okay. So one of the things I want to ask you about is, why don't you have a strategy right now? Why this strategy that you're creating, why doesn't it already exist? And so you could give a really quick answer to this question, but don't do that. What I want you to do is to use a technique called the power of why. And I want you to go from kind of that surface knee-jerk observation that you came up with to something that really delivers real insight. So keep asking why until you get to something that's really actionable. So let's look at an example. So why don't we have an AI strategy already? And so you might say, well, 'cause no one here knows enough about AI. But then I might ask why? Well, we never really trained anyone in AI or hired an expert in AI. Why? Well, management's always had other priorities. Why? Well, they don't see how it makes them money. Why? Well, because nobody has ever made a compelling case. Well, now you've gotten down to something that's actionable. How do you make the compelling case for AI in your business? Because if you could, all the rest of those things that you said would get solved. And so this is really what we want you to think about. So as you're asking yourself all of these questions, as you're asking yourself what your goal is, what your vision is, as you're asking yourself about these obstacles, as you're putting your plan together, keep using the power of why, so that you keep digging down until you get to something where you say, okay, well that tells me what we need to do. Because that's what you're trying to focus on is, what do you need to do? So is this the actual root cause that no one has ever made a compelling case? If it is, then that's your answer. If not, then you have to ask a few more why questions. But if that's your answer, that's the focus of your plan. How do you make the compelling case for this so that you can actually solve the problem? So let's summarize all the things you have to do coming out of this lesson. We want you to start your plan. So choose an organization for your AI strategy. Optionally, you can choose a region or a product area if you're picking a large organization. And decide who you're gonna present your plan to. And choose the first AI problem that you're gonna solve. And remember all along the way, use the power of why to figure out why you don't have this problem solved already. All right, go after it.