AI-as-a-Business

Recent breakthroughs in AI have unlocked new value for companies to create and capture. Venture capital firms are spraying money around, hoping to back the next AI decacorn. However, it’s far from clear which companies will succeed in both creating and capturing value — i.e. which ones ultimately prove to be financially sustainable.

This talk is about how to operationalize AI as part of a business, not how to develop it. We will explore aspects of building a successful AI business, such as "How do you establish a data moat?", "What are the trade-offs between vertical, domain-specific solutions and more general applications?", "How important is explainability, particularly in regulated industries?", and "How sensitive are users to issues with precision/recall?". The talk will not pretend like there are easy answers but rather discuss what we've learned so far as an industry.