IPsoft is, in many ways, an unusual entrant into the crowded, but burgeoning, artificial intelligence industry. First of all, it is not a startup, but a 20-year-old company and its leader isn’t some millennial savant, but a fashionable former NYU professor named Chetan Dube. It bills its cognitive agent, Amelia, as the “world’s most human AI.”
It got its start building and selling autonomic IT solutions and its years of experience providing business solutions give it a leg up on many of its competitors. It can offer not only technological solutions, but insights it gained helping businesses to streamline operations with automation.
Ever since IBM’s Watson defeated human champions on the game show Jeopardy!, the initial excitement about AI has led to inflated expectations and often given way to disappointment. So I met recently with top executives at IPsoft to get a better understanding of how leaders can successfully implement AI solutions. Here are four things you should keep in mind:
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At Google’s X division, the company’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is “#MonkeyFirst.” The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you’d better start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.
The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.
The truth is that most places are designed to produce pedestals and not to train monkeys. They work within existing frameworks and hone operations to improve performance against established metrics. That works great as long as people want pedestals, but unless you learn how to do something fundamentally new, you’re bound to be disrupted eventually.
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Has America lost its fascination with the tech industry? An article that went viral on CNBC suggests that the bloom is very much off the rose. Fashioned as a letter from a disappointed dad to an misguided son, it blasts the tech world for its miscues over the past year, from frat-boy antics to a sometimes appalling lack of transparency.
In a sense, this shouldn’t be surprising. Silicon Valley is no longer a collection of swashbuckling upstarts battling corporate behemoths. Today, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are the most valuable companies in the world. Younger firms, such as Facebook and Uber, have already become powerful forces in our lives.
Perhaps most of all, the digital revolution is now two decades old and it has become very hard to move the needle. Compared with the personal computer, the Internet and the smartphone, smart watches and talking assistants don’t add that much value. To be truly useful, digital technology can’t stand alone, but must learn to empower industries in the physical world.
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One of the most often told stories about innovation is that of Alexander Fleming and his discovery of penicillin. Returning after a summer holiday in 1928, the solitary Scottish scientist noticed that a strange mold had contaminated the bacteria cultures he was growing. That single observation would change the world.
At least, that’s how the story is usually told. What really happened is that when Fleming published his findings, no one really noticed because what he discovered couldn’t have cured anyone. It wasn’t until a decade later that his paper was unearthed by another group of scientists who engineered it into the miracle cure we know today.
The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all because it arrives out of context. Great innovations not only change the world, the world changes them and while that’s going on no one really knows how things will turn out. That’s what nobody tells you about innovation. To do it well you need to learn to live in a state of confusion.
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When Jim Allison received a call from Dr. Jedd Wolchok, asking him to come to his office, he was puzzled at first. As a researcher, he rarely ventured into the clinical part of the hospital. Yet when he opened the door and saw his colleague sitting with a young woman whose emotion was clearly marked on her face, he immediately understood and tears began to fill his eyes.
A few months before, the woman had terminal cancer, but she had just been told that she was in remission. Today, more than a decade later, she remains cancer free and works as a fitness instructor. It was a breakthrough of monumental proportions and one that would make Allison world famous.
The field Allison pioneered, cancer immunotherapy, is now a major branch of medical science with thousands of people working to improve it and expand its use. Breakthroughs like of this magnitude are never routine, but they almost always share common attributes and we can learn a lot from how Allison overcame intense challenges to create a miracle cure.
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In 1993, advertising legend Jay Chiat announced his radical plans for the office of the future. His agency, Chiat/Day, was already a paragon of creativity — its legendary campaigns included Apple’s “1984” and “Think Different” campaigns — and its new LA office, designed by Frank Gehry was to be its monument.
The space was engineered to be playful; with decorations that included pieces from fairground rides and a four-story sized set of binoculars. Chiat also banished the traditional office cubicles and desks in favor of public spaces where executives could meet in impromptu places and brainstorm ideas.
It was a disaster. As Tim Harford explains in his book Messy, our desire for engineered spaces — even creative ones — can kill productivity and innovation. At the same time, disorder and disruption can help us to do our very best work. While this defies conventional wisdom, decades of research suggests that a messy desk may very well be a mark of genius.
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Everywhere you look today, it seems like we’re on the brink of a clean energy revolution. Electric car sales are estimated to have topped a million units in 2017. Wind and solar installations are booming with rapidly declining costs. Goldman Sachs predicts that $3 trillion will be invested in clean energy over the next 20 years.
Yet still there is a fly in the ointment. We need cheaper and more powerful batteries to make clean energy work and the current technology, lithium-ion, is unlikely to get us there. So we not only need new and better batteries, we need new and better battery chemistries and those don’t come around very often.
A new startup, Form Energy, thinks it’s found an answer from a surprising place, sulfur, which is a byproduct of oil refining and considered a pollutant. After decades of dependence on fossil fuels, we literally have mountains of the stuff, which makes it incredibly cheap. Ironically, we may have spent decades polluting ourselves into a green energy future.
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In Simon Sinek’s popular TED Talk, which remains one of the most viewed ever, he explains how great leaders, like Steve Jobs, the Wright Brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. succeed where many others failed because they put purpose first. “Start with why,” he says and then move on to the “what” and the “how.”
That’s generally good advice. The best way to build a great organization is to start with a clear mission rather than a plan or a product. Still, it overlooks another very important truth. Success eventually breeds failure and, when that happens, you must venture into the unknown where your purpose becomes unclear.
That’s a very different type of problem and we need to approach it differently. We have to explore, probe new spaces and make new connections. That’s the only way you will come across the unexpected, random pieces of insight that can take you in a new direction. Starting with the “why” is one path to success, but sometimes it’s better to start with the “why not?”
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Accountants tell us that numbers don’t lie, because for them numbers are the same as facts. Mathematicians see it differently though. They see numbers as abstract representations of reality that, when combined with other numbers, have an almost mystical ability to create patterns that unlock hidden truths.
In other words, as the great early 20th century numbers theorist G. H. Hardy put it, “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.” Identifying these hidden truths can open up new possibilities and take us in new directions.
For example, the development of non-Euclidean geometry in the early 1800s paved the way for Einstein’s general relativity a century later. In much the same way, in David Stipp’s new book, A Most Elegant Equation, the veteran science writer describes how deep connections between numbers can help us bridge the gap between intuition and real world applications.
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A decade ago, Microsoft was considered a dinosaur. It had missed the shift to mobile, was out of step with consumer tastes and seemed too big and slow to adapt to a digital world that was moving at hyper-speed. Yet today, the company is thriving again, largely driven by a cloud business that is doubling every year.
This is not a new effort. In fact, it began in the early 2000’s, but was little noticed until recently. In much the same way, IBM’s Watson project, which is helping the venerable company overcome the disruption of its traditional business, began in 2005. Google has created its own moonshot factory, to pursue game changing technologies.
These are not ‘bet the company” initiatives, but sustained efforts to pursue grand challenges that can fundamentally change the realm of the possible. In recent years, we’ve come to associate the practice of innovation with speed and agility, but to what truly moves the needle can’t be achieved quickly or through mere iteration. We need to set our sights higher.
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