AI & Interaction Paradigms

AI in the recent era

Roughly every ten years a new paradigm comes along that changes the way we interact with computers. It’s not the secret, what can be the next one! A single interaction points that can handle multiple platforms and can generate multi-tasking output is the new point of attraction on innovations. In last decade billions of dollars have been invested to invent the Artificial Intelligence Platform that can cater exact performance and assist us in our daily work.

In the race to develop single interaction interface for the users, lots of noise has been generated to brand the efforts by many enterprises and promoted as super meaningful AI platforms, while it’s still incomplete. The main question here is, how do we take basic technologies of today and transform it experientially into a real paradigm to interact with all systems at a single interaction point.  

AI – Essential Aspects

To explore the essential features of Artificial Intelligence that can be a single point of interaction that can communicate with multiple application platforms and can take the user experience to the next level, below listed aspects should be considered:

 

One Assistant:

To ease out the use experience there should be just one assistant instead of multiple device network and various type of interfaces. The objective of bringing AI into daily life work is to simplify the things and not to complicate it from usability perspective.

 

While interacting with single interactive points, user must not have to think about selecting a user services out of many and must not have to finalize specific service to ask a particular question. A user just want to post the query and expecting an authenticated answer as the search result.

 

Personalized Experience:

Another essential aspect is to provide the users a personalized experience crafted according to their needs and their desires. For instance, based on frequent order, AI should be able to record and suggest products according to users regular shopping habit. The potential of any AI platform can be measured from its capability to learn user behavior effectively.

 

Platform Independence:

Ability to adapt AI on any platform and collaborate with many required application platform is the one of the most desired aspects of AI. ETL process of such platform is key feature to make it more robust.

 

Powered by Multiple Services:
Every company and application platform in the world should have resources to plug in AI platform and start using interactive modes for different kind of services. This can be considered as the most important aspect of AI platform as the primary objective of single interactive system is to bring all basic application platforms of daily life to a single mode of communication.

 

Hope this insights will help you to understand future of interactive technology. The second half of these insights are to be posted soon! Have a great time…  🙂

Ingredients to drive the team effectively

 

Keeping everything “In Control” and “Being Boss” is now old school management concept. Now team of intellectuals requires The Leader and not the boss! Furnishing yourself as a Leader is more than managing things well, it requires inter personal skills to manage human resources, to understand personal emotions attached to professional emissions. Here are my observations to drive the project effectively without facing the crunch time with the team:

Getting Support from the Executives :

• Drafting a Straw Man Proposal :

A “straw man” can be very useful, as long as people know that it has been designed to be pulled apart. When you begin a project or start looking into a problem, you often have incomplete information to work with. Rather than wait while you gather all the facts and data, a “straw man” lets you get going straight away with an incomplete solution, with the intention of finding a much better one, as you gain experience. Indeed, the criticism and testing that it receives provides vital feedback that can be used to develop a final outcome that is rock solid.

Suppose your revenue is falling and you have to come up with a better sales strategy. Using the straw man idea you might do the following:

• Create a draft proposal to expand to new markets.
• In your proposal, outline the markets that might offer good prospects, based on your initial judgment and experience.
• Present your draft proposal to the team and tell them that it is a straw man – This is critical because everyone must clearly understand that your idea is the starting point and was created for the purpose of being critiqued.)
• Analyze the proposal, find the weak points, clarify assumptions and decision-making criteria, and work on a refined proposal.
• Draft a new proposal and repeat the process until a final decision is made. These subsequent proposals can be given names too: such as wood man, tin man and iron man.

In a culture that values being right, the notion of constructing a straw man is difficult to embrace. Why spend time drafting something that, ultimately, isn’t going to be used? If you can get past this perception you will be surprised at how useful the technique can be. One of its main advantages is that it forces you to do something. Taking too long to deliberate the merits of an idea or hypothesis can be costly, as you risk never making a decision at all. With a straw man, you force an early, if incomplete, decision. This ensures that a final decision will be reached because doing nothing means accepting a poor plan by default.

Thus, drafting a Straw Man proposal helps the Executive Team, a great tool to evolve the project/proposal with the passage of time and new findings/observations and pushes the project for the vital decisions to create the desired benchmarks.

 

• Set the right expectations & time to nurture the organization :

Any activity done without clear vision and mission is considered as “purposeless”. Considering the same, executive team must clear vision and mission of the organization and set the right expectations among the team. Envisioning the Managers and Employees with expected goals and milestones of the organization, helps to maintain streamlined productivity throughout the journey. In project management, this also leads the team for an effective communication among all stakeholders.

For any startup, rightly set expectations interests the investors and leads the organization to wrap up probation period real quick. After this, a very crucial stage is to provide time to nurture the organization and teams. As they say, “Fruits can’t be made overnight!!” – the startup needs a fair time to get matured as Enterprise along with lots of nurturing efforts.. To bifurcate, we can assume that first 2-3 years should be spent in building the organization and potential team focused to build meaningful services and products. For the year 3-4, executive team should be focused on building the market for the existing products and robust revenue model for funding fuels.

 

• Set up Key Performance Indicators (KPI):

Any activity shall be considered vague if we remove the purpose or goal out of it. Similary productivity can only be measured with completion of milestones. Such milestones can be considered as “Key Performance Indicators (KPI).  A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization.

Whether it is project management or sales management, KPIs adds the value in analysing the gap between estimated productivity and actual productivity. Such indicators are also helpful the measure the monetary aspects of the productivity, such as budgeting, estimation and profit/loss outcomes.

KPIs are applied in Business Intelligence (BI) to gauge business trends and advise tactical courses of action. Before KPIs can be identified, the following requirements must be met:

• A predefined organizational process.
• Clear business objectives for the process.
• Quantitative and qualitative measurements.
• An active approach to finding and remedying enterprise variances.

Thus, putting up KPIs in the organization, helps to drive the environment more focused and productivity oriented.

 

• Turn your Prototypes into Products :

 

Once the “Innovation Lab” is created and functional with roles and responsibility, the litmus test of the team begins while designing the prototype. Designing a prototype is highly important and recommended before finalizing on any product development for commercial market. Such approach manages the failure risks well and negates the rework on the implementation of the concept.

To take the company on next levels, it’s mandatory for Innovation Lab to come up with 2-3 unique product/service prototypes every year and get at least one prototype matured enough to push into productions. This road map leads the organization towards the ultimate success. Such practices also ensures regular delivery and “Out of the Box” product management.

 

• Put your ideas into experiments :

 

Volatility is the essential element for growth. It is highly recommended for executive team to put various ideas into experiments is necessary. Considering the changing demand of consumer market, put your efforts on Technological Experiments and try to offer your clients/customers with easy process to deal with your team. For an instance, if you’re having a store, try to begin with online selling platform, once you’re live with online store, try to provide your online customers with advance and easy search functionality, offer them a better preview of the products and so on.

This frequent experiments provides your customers an active engagement with the organization. Once the experiment is implemented successfully, integrate it as a functionality of the system permanently.

Winning Support from the Executives :

 

• Creating a Snowball Effect:

 

A “Snowball Effect” consist of small iterations of the actions and execution transforming into huge course of actions and implementation just like a life cycle of a “Snowball”. When the snowball is created it is small and tiny, once it gets rolled over the mountain, it gains more snow and mass turning into giant rolling ball.

The same is applicable while managing projects, where innovation starts with a small idea or a firm belief based on fact findings and observations. Following the idea, small iterative course of actions is designed, which initiates the base and pillars of the project and thus multiple executions of iterations turns into huge project streamlined with multiple team coordination. This approach aligns team from small task sprints till big data analysis and huge implementations without creating crunch time or stress for the Managers/Employees.

 

• Creating Mentorship Programs :

 

Company Managers and Employees are the biggest assets to the company. Organization can perform well only when their resources are having enough potential and spirit to overcome the challenging task. To bridge the skill gap of employees, organization can arrange mentoring programs to make the resources explore and learn new concepts, theories, implementation methods and management approaches to make their vision broader with improved skill sets.

Another way to apply such mentoring programs is to create inter-team training sessions. This is very effective approach as company’s existing resources can explore knowledge and processes of all vertices/department; resulting in better role management and resource backup creations while managing the projects.

Though these are limited observations, all are experimented, executed and successfully implemented concepts in my practices while managing the team. I will try to keep on adding more in this context as and when I realize anything useful.

Hope this will help you in practicing better and streamlined management. Have a Happy Business!! 🙂