Expert Perspectives: Enhancing business with data and AI

This week we spoke to Dr. Leila Etaati, co-founder, data scientist, consultant and mentor at RADACAD, about what she thought was the key to success with AI for businesses, and how her business was implementing these beliefs. The RADACAD team work with other companies to deliver expert training and consulting around all things data, with a passion for helping businesses improve by listening to their data.

So what does Leila have to say to businesses seeking success with AI? She tells us that using AI is key to analysing what is going on in your business and deciding how to respond.

“Using Machine Learning, as part of AI, can help businesses to find the existing patterns in their data and be ready to better plan for the future.”

Dr. Etaati reports that her business has begun applying AI to the data that they work with. Once they have cleaned and transformed the data for their clients, they are left with large amounts of good quality data, presenting the perfect opportunity to apply ML and AI. They can also apply things like text analytics and image recognition to the unstructured data.

“[Businesses] do not have a proper picture of the current status of their company, and they need to understand the existing patterns. To become ready for applying AI, they need to have better data.”

This is the biggest problem that Dr. Etaati believes that businesses face. Without the full picture, businesses can lose their way, so it is important to protect their future by setting up good data practices. It is important for businesses to get comfortable with data before they start perusing AI.

She went on to say that the future holds a lot more self-service AI, meaning that for each field, the experts will need to better understand the processes of AI, ML, data transformation and analytics.

“It does not just belong to academics and statisticians. Easy AI can be used in any application, for more complex scenarios, we will have some AI and ML domain experts that employ AI in their sectors.”

To get a firmer grasp on the technicalities of ML, she recommends reading the book Machine Learning with R by Brett Lantz.

Dr. Leila Etaati has a PhD and 10 years of data science experience, has been recognised by Microsoft as an MVP for AI and Data Platforms and has published her own book, Power BI with R, which you can download for free.