1. Intro
AI Hidden Problems – Despite having been around for more than 50 years, AI is perceived by many as still being in its infancy. For sure a 20 years long winter has been helping a lot in looking at AI as a newborn more than a middle-age trying to get back in shape.
Anyhow things recently have been changing fast, really fast. One key pattern showing that today AI is back and it is back to stay is that most of the questions we hear about AI are no more related to tech stuff but to ethical or business issues.
2. Wrong questions
As any technology the key goal of AI is to provide answers to problems. To truly leverage AI we need to be able to ask the right questions, those that lead to a reply that embed a viable solution to a real problem.
If we have a recurring business based on subscriptions we should have a clear idea if we should worry more about gaining new customers or retaining the existing ones. The choice can vary depending on the phase we are in. If we just started a new venture we probably need more new customers while if we are running a successful operation we’ll probably need to take a closer look at churn rates.
If we are focussed on new acquisitions, AI can help us spot what makes our potential customers happier while, if churn is our concern, we’ll probably need to ask AI to help us spot the first symptoms of an unhappy customer.
3. Missing goals
Whichever is the question we ask AI to help us with, one thing is quite sure: we need to give AI a quantifiable goal. We can embrace adaptive targeting to be quick and agile in reacting to a changing scenario, but our AI, at any given moment, should have a clear goal to reach. And the goal is quite never to collect more data but to get smarter in reading the data we already have.
