Data is King but Speed is the Emperor

To all the leaders out there, challenge your work family to go faster but never forget to pay attention to the great ideas that your work family puts out there on a regular basis. Leaders should never let themselves become vulnerable to paralysis by analysis. Even when you are not fully aligned with the team, simply commit to them if your team believes in it. If the idea becomes a success (Transparent and Bezos), your work family will bask under it's glory and the results will speak for themselves. In case they fail, the learnings from the failure will make them resilient and become better than before. Most importantly, for them seeing that you had full belief in their abilities and the fact that you trusted them will go a long way, guaranteeing success for your team. So have faith in your team, push the team to go faster, brainstorm and commit faster, fail faster and watch the transformation.

Remember "Data is King but Speed is the Emperor".

Be Afraid of Your Customers

Be afraid of your customers. Be afraid every day that they may decide to take their business somewhere else and leave you hanging. This mindset will challenge all of us specially the ones in the retail sector to ensure that we go out there everyday to provide our customers an experience which is nothing less than exceptional. Never think about aiming for a short term gain that will jeopardize your long term vision or goal however lucrative it may seem.

Formula for Success

Work like a startup, Deliver like a startup (Agility), and offer nothing less than a Ritzy customer experience

Object Detection APIs will change the future of camera apps

Google launches tensorflow object detection api. This can help stir a new trend in photo apps where the apps can be then used to remove detected items from a photo and may be even replace an object with a different object. Think #SNAPCHAT AR ads, and enhance them to allow objects from your own photos replace those in another pictures. Potentially in the future, this can be moved to videos when combined with Google cloud Video Intelligence API. Take it one step further and let computers build your marketing ads on the fly and publish with human intervention.

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/supercharge-your-computer-vision-models.html

AI for self-optimizing E-Commerce Experiences

Aritificial Intelligence (AI) in E-Commerce can be used to personalize, influence and guide customer shopping behavior to items, products and services that they actually will buy or are indeed looking for. This would make use of "in-the-moment" personalized recommendations based on a user's actions on the website in near realtime vs relying upon prevalent recommendation strategies based on historical data such customer who saw item A bought item B.

AI can also be used to revolutionize A/B testing where instead of human beings defining, building, optimizing and then determining the experience winner, machine learning can be leveraged to run multiple A/B tests simultaneously and then run different combinations of all the experiences, followed by the best possible combination, selecting the winning customer experience that ensures highest conversion rates. An E-Commerce giant planning to change the look and feel of their site can take all the different designs across say their home, promotional, product and cart pages and have the AI based A/B testing engine run all the different combinations. AI based A/B testing can even self optimize the winning combination to test potential increase in conversion rates. Let's use machine learning to drive E-Commerce. #RiseOfBots #RiseOfMachines

Some work being done in this space by Sentient Technologies

http://www.sentient.ai/ascend/

The Rise of AI and the End of Online Privacy

Online Privacy - Does the Generation Z care about online Privacy? The impending death of privacy combined with the ever increasing use of Algorithms, AI and Machine Learning to predict, Infer, suggest, recommend and potentially even make future decisions will shape a new world where human decision making may rely solely on machines vs. input from their fellow beings. Bots telling you when to buy stocks, air tickets, concert tickets etc are becoming prevalent today and will more likely be used by humans in the near future for most of their decision making. If you get a chance do listen to the following. #RiseofMachines


Dr. Michael Kosinski - Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business

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