AI

ML

AI PLAYBOOK FOR
THE ENTERPRISE
HOW TO DRIVE SUCCESSFUL AI ADOPTION
AT YOUR ORGANIZATION

In this playbook, we’ll walk you through how AI and machine learning are
fundamentally changing enterprises. We’ll define the promise of these technologies
and explain how organizations can solve business challenges that were previously
unsolvable. We will also share the lessons we learned along the way in helping
organizations build and scale AI capabilities across the enterprise.
 Where do Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a topic of great interest in recent years, with
many arguing that it has the potential to revolutionize industries in the same

you see your way that the Internet has over the past three decades. PwC estimates that AI
will drive GDP growth of $15.7 trillion by 20301 through productivity gains such

business as automated or autonomous processes and hyper-personalized products

and services.

in five years? According to a recent MIT Sloan Management Review2 study, 91 percent of
respondents expect to derive new business value from AI implementations
over the next five years. The study found that even 81 percent of passive
adopters — businesses that currently experience indirect benefits from AI-
based products — expect to attain direct value from AI in the next few years.

Given the above, business leaders are asking: What impact will AI have
on my organization, and does AI have the potential to disrupt or
transform my business?
91%
In the business world, the question is no longer whether you should adopt AI
technologies. Instead, it’s a question of when and how. Key decision makers
are contemplating where to invest in AI and which capabilities they will need in
of business executives expect
order to transform their businesses. Above all, they are exploring how to build
to derive new business value
AI in an unbiased, responsible and transparent way in order to maintain the
from AI implementations over
trust of customers and stakeholders.
the next five years

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review
As an award-winning company that has built transformative AI solutions for
a variety of industries, we have spent several years helping organizations
tackle these key concerns. As a result, we’ve been fortunate enough to
address many of the challenges surrounding AI, and we’ve witnessed and
helped shape the evolution of AI applications first-hand. Now, we’re ready to
share key insights and best practices that will help your organization pursue
its own AI initiatives with success.

1. PwC AI Impact Index 2. MIT Sloan Management Review 2018 Global Executive Study and Research Report on AI

2
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 The Big Idea
WHY AI?

AI can solve cognitive problems and automate complex processes that have traditionally required
considerable human input.

AI represents a revolutionary new paradigm for computing. For the better part of a century, computers have required
structured data and discrete instructions written by humans.

AI and ML do things quite differently. They enable computers to learn on their own. Using a combination of structured
and unstructured data, AI and ML can decipher our world in surprisingly human ways: through sight, sound, speech and
pattern recognition.

Over the past few decades, advances in machine-learning algorithms, ever-increasing data sets and hyper-scale cloud
computing have enabled machines to gain considerable cognitive capabilities. For quite some time, AI and ML were the
exclusive domain of deep-pocketed enterprises. Now, due to a combination of open-source software, pre-trained
APIs and the ability to rent hyperscale cloud computing, AI and ML “superpowers” are accessible to a wider range of
businesses and budgets.

AI-ASSISTED HEALTHCARE AI-ASSISTED CONTACT CENTERS

—— Unlocking Deeper Patient Insights: Healthcare
providers have millions of records in their EHR systems,
representing a hard-to-manage mix of structured and
unstructured data. ML models can help make sense
of it all, tagging patient interactions, assessing before-
and-after factors for each interaction and predicting
the probability of events like unwanted patient
readmissions.
—— Medical Image Segmentation: Deep learning and
computer vision are helping medical professionals
make critical diagnoses more quickly and with greater
accuracy. ML models are capable of analyzing many
input files at once to identify regions of interest in
CT scans, reducing decision-making time from days
to seconds.
—— Improved Customer and Employee Experience:
Through chatbots and virtual agents, AI transforms
the experience for customers and contact-center
representatives. These virtual agents handle human-
like conversations via phone, web chat, social media
and a host of other channels.
—— Seamless Integration: AI solutions integrate with
telephony providers to give virtual agents the capacity
to seamlessly transfer conversations to live agents
when tasks become too complex.
—— Versatility: AI leverages custom solutions for real-
time speech analytics, workforce capacity planning,
call scripting and compliance monitoring to improve
experience while dramatically reducing costs.

—— Remote Patient Monitoring: AI can identify

patients with a high risk of interventional care,
target care-management needs and reduce the cost
of care while improving health outcomes.

3
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 WHAT CAN AI DO THAT WASN’T POSSIBLE BEFORE?

In other words, what "superpowers" are we talking about here? AI and ML let you solve problems in
ways that weren't possible with computers until recently.

There are five key traits that give AI and ML applications these unique problem-solving powers.

The ability to The ability to The ability to The ability to The ability to optimize
understand visuals hear speech and understand the anticipate what is large, complex and
transcribe it into text semantic meaning likely to happen next dynamic systems
of words based on historical
data patterns

While the earliest applications of AI and ML were in diagnostic areas, viable use-cases are growing in complexity as the
technologies evolve. Increasingly, AI and ML are being used as assistive mechanisms with humans in the loop to provide
dramatic improvements in efficiency. In some rare cases, AI and ML provide autonomous capabilities that can automate
processes end-to-end.

AI-ASSISTED MARKETING

—— Customer Journey Mapping: Automated trendspotting, propensity modeling and customer segmentation will help you
better understand the path to purchase. These solutions provide easy access to customer behavior patterns for more
informed decision making.

—— Predicting Marketing Outcomes: Machine learning can forecast the lifetime value of customers and their likelihood of
purchasing, identifying behaviors and attributes specific to high-value audiences.

—— Customer Experience: Through sentiment monitoring and data-driven segmentation, AI can provide personalized messaging
and content. Clustering algorithms can categorize customer behavior, pinpoint how consumers feel about a certain brand or
company and make the entire experience personalized and frictionless.

4
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 Is this a big deal for my
business?
WHERE IN MY BUSINESS CAN AI MAKE AN IMPACT?

In working with several clients as an AI software and services provider, we’ve discovered four key areas that are
priorities for most companies. Regardless of the industry or vertical, many organizations struggle in making their
products smarter, in creating frictionless customer experiences and in automating key processes. At the
same time, they are under pressure to uncover and address anomalies, threats and risks that will help make
their business safer.

Smarter Frictionless customer Autonomous Detecting and managing

products experiences processes anomalies and risks

FOUR BUSINESS FUNCTIONS WHERE AI CAN MAKE AN IMPACT

Recent advancements in AI and machine learning (ML) have made significant improvements possible in addressing
and managing common business priorities. Custom applications can help identify parts of your business that can be
optimized. Let's look at four common business challenges through the lens of what's now possible with AI and ML:

SMARTER PRODUCTS

Basic computing involves a microprocessor following instructions created by a human being. Where this process
breaks down is with cognitive problems: situations in which a human cannot define programming instructions
explicitly. Machine learning and AI provide viable mechanisms to address such cognitive problems.

In the media world, computer vision and deep learning help analyze hours of video quickly, identifying content
attributes such as actors, objects, actions and brands that drive viewer engagement. In the realm of education,
students are receiving custom college recommendations, automated grading of their statements of purpose and
essays, and feedback on their video interviews. AI is automating a large portion of the application process, allowing
students to apply to several schools simultaneously.

5
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 DETECTING AND MANAGING ANOMALIES
FRICTIONLESS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
AND RISKS

Activating someone’s interest is only the first step in
converting them into a paying customer. Traditionally,
finding and retaining high-value customers involves a
lot of guesswork. How many times have you had to vet
an incoming lead before determining whether it was
qualified? Instead of connecting with the ideal customers
for your business, you’re wasting time manually sorting
through leads that aren’t worth pursuing.
AI can do this initial vetting for you. By applying ML
technologies such as natural language processing to
text documents, the process of targeting, acquiring
and retaining customers becomes much more precise.
Most companies we’ve worked with have experienced
significant growth in new customer acquisition and
retention through targeted application of machine
learning. (Source: Quantiphi)
AUTONOMOUS PROCESSES
Regardless of the industry, every enterprise has risks.
Examples include business-continuity risks such as
denial-of-service attacks and data breaches. Industries
such as insurance and lending have their entire business
models hinging on effective risk management. What if
you could identify potential landmines before they turn
into existential threats?
By training AI models to detect anomalies and risks,
companies can anticipate what is likely to happen next
and put safeguards in place to protect themselves
against threats.
Whether you apply a recommendation engine to
anticipate your customer’s next purchase or predict
downtime of your equipment to perform preventative
maintenance, AI is able to bring quantifiable business
impact to a large variety of enterprise functions.

Organizations engaged in the supply chain are always

looking to do more with less. Before AI, operating
efficiencies were possible, but not as deep or quick
to define and implement.

By applying ML techniques such as recurrent neural

networks for time series forecasting, organizations
have seen unprecedented improvement in their ability
to forecast demand, capacity and revenue. Additionally,
through the application of reinforcement learning,
enterprises have seen dramatic improvement in their
ability to optimize large, complex and dynamic systems.
Now, you can effectively manage and streamline your
demand, procurement and production beyond what
conventional algorithms have been able to solve.

6
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 Real-world results: AI case
studies and success stories
INCREASING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION WITH AI-ASSISTED
VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS

Challenge: Advisors from a large educational-services company were responsible for

managing incoming queries regarding new enrollments, student communications and
other questions. They manually pulled chat logs to identify prospects and lacked a way
to respond at high volumes or outside of normal business hours, resulting in long wait 50%
times for students.

Solution: We developed an always-on virtual assistant trained on existing chat logs

to address student queries. By automating the query-handling process, overall Quantiphi AI-assisted

productivity was improved by reducing manual efforts. Our solution also enhanced virtual assistants helped

the student experience. one company reduce its

query resolution time

Results: By using a virtual assistant to handle all incoming queries, the client was able by 50 percent

to reduce resolution time by half while improving the overall user experience. Source: Quantiphi

ML MAKES EVERY SECOND COUNT DURING A HEALTH EMERGENCY

Challenge: A nationwide healthcare system required medical-image segmentation to

expedite diagnoses and prevent critical situations for patients requiring interventional
care following head trauma. The healthcare system’s previous ML models were trained
on a low volume of data due to compute and storage constraints, resulting in lower
accuracy levels and high inference times.
Quantiphi’s machine
Solution: Using state-of-the-art deep-learning architectures, we trained several models learning model helped
on a fully automated training pipeline. We were able to stack several modules, including a healthcare system
DICOM classification, and combined skull-stripping models with image segmentation to reduce surgery
compute the volume of artifacts on 3D CT scans with a high degree of accuracy. decision-making
time from days
Results: We built a model that’s capable of handling a variety of input files in a single down to seconds
pipeline and providing accurate estimations of artefacts such as blood clots. This assistive Source: Quantiphi

solution helps reduce inference times from days down to seconds — a crucial statistic
when it comes to saving lives.

7
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 VIRTUAL TESTING FOR IMPROVED AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURING

Challenge: A manufacturer of auto-safety systems wanted an automated solution to

identify critical features and predict the friction coefficient of materials. The goal was
to reduce the number of iterations in designing brake pads.

Virtual testing helped

Solution: We developed an ML model that allows the company to predict critical factors
a manufacturer of
influencing the friction coefficient. We also built an intuitive web interface that enabled
auto-safety systems
chemical formulators to submit input features and get the corresponding friction
reduce design
coefficient of the materials.
iterations to save
time and money
Results: Our solution helped the company optimize the formulation of brake pads,
achieving the desired value of friction coefficient with an accuracy of more than 80 percent. Source: Quantiphi

This virtual-testing solution helped save time and money through an expected reduction
in design iterations.

Where do I start?
FINDING IMPACTFUL AI USE CASES FOR YOUR BUSINESS

One of AI’s best traits is also its biggest source of confusion. Namely, the potential
applications of AI and ML are so versatile that many businesses simply don’t know where
to start. What’s more, “AI” and “ML” are all-encompassing terms that don’t refer to any
specific application. An AI or ML solution could involve computer vision, speech recognition,
natural language processing, statistical pattern recognition or a combination of the above.

That’s especially the case with applied AI applications. The techniques can be customized
to each client’s needs when it comes to solving complex problems. As a result, most
clients find it difficult to comprehend the spectrum of possibilities and pinpoint the
specific use-cases that will create the most-transformative impact to their business.

8
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 Identifying the key areas in which AI can make an impact requires one to answer three sets of questions
and find convergence points:

KEY TARGETS FOR AI-ASSISTED SOLUTIONS

Understanding the tasks in which

AI is nearing or breaching human
AI impact zone levels of performance.3

What are the tasks where Finding activities within your

inference/decision can be business that are expensive
made in a matter of seconds? and repetitive, yet cannot be
reduced to simple heuristics.

In our experience, having a guided workshop that uses this simple yet practical framework will help you apply these
questions across your core business functions. The process can yield use-cases that are highly feasible and offer the
best odds for success. These working sessions have helped organizations identify key targets for AI-assisted solutions,
such as radiology-image segmentation for healthcare organizations, engine-defect detection for automotive companies,
virtual assistants for insurance-claims processing and email-routing agents for customer-service functions.

AI: PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

Most enterprises understand
AI’s potential to transform the
way they operate, but they may
not fully grasp what goes into
deploying a solution.
3. Electronic Frontier Foundation AI Progress Measurement
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
The perception: The most
common misconception is that
AI is “automagical.” The results
can certainly seem that way, but
it’s not as easy as feeding data
into an algorithm running on a
supercomputer and having it solve
all your problems instantly. It takes
a lot of iterations in the trenches
to label data, train models, evalu-
ate results and deploy a custom
solution.
The reality: AI is just like any
other engineering problem.
Building a solution requires a
sequence of fundamental steps.
—— Defining your business
problem(s)
—— Collecting and labeling data
—— Multiple iterations of
developing, training and
evaluating models
—— Deploying the model into
your workflow
9
 What capabilities do I need for
AI success?
AI and ML can benefit a variety of businesses, but it’s essential to create a solid foundation for a successful deployment.

When you approach an AI integration with the following four capabilities in mind, you’ll get a consistent process from
idea to business impact, one that can scale to multiple business functions across the enterprise. Here are the four
essential ingredients for a successful AI rollout:

Technology Talent
platform
1 2

Workflow Reusable model

repository
4 3

1. TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM

You need a scalable technology platform that can ingest, label and pre-process a large amount of data, train models
in a distributed environment across multiple GPUs or TPUs and deploy your trained models to handle high-volume
inference workloads while making your models re-usable across a variety of scenarios.

It is worth noting that in recent years, Google has pioneered widespread use of AI across its products and has
largely been responsible for bringing AI out of academia and into the mainstream. The Google Brain team has
published a variety of industry-leading AI research and released TensorFlow, the world's most-popular open-source
machine-learning framework. Through the Google Cloud Platform, the organization is democratizing AI and making
fully managed services available that can enable any organization to take advantage of machine learning.

10
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 2. TALENT

The mainstream belief is that building AI solutions requires "unicorns," magical mythical creatures that can code on
command line, have a deep understanding of the mathematical and statistical techniques underlying machine learning
and have a strong hands-on feel for the business. The truth is that this type of talent is extremely rare and non-scalable.

In our experience, it is much more viable to staff AI projects with a combination of cloud, data and ML engineers work-
ing alongside a business domain expert, all under the guidance of a solutions architect who has a prior track record of
success in AI initiatives. We call this model “synthetic unicorns,” and we’ve seen it scale to hundreds of team members
across multiple business work streams, all working under a well-orchestrated AI Center of Excellence.

3. REUSABLE MODEL REPOSITORY

We have seen several successful implementations of point solutions in AI. However, most enterprises find themselves
in situations where multiple groups are trying to solve similar problems and unable to benefit from work performed by
other groups. In order to avoid this scenario and enable collaboration and reuse, we recommend that organizations set
up a repository that includes the following artifacts:

—— Model objects
—— Source code used to train the model objects
—— Training data used to train the model objects
—— Training and inference pipelines
—— Notebooks
—— Documentation

4. WORKFLOW

You can have the right talent, data and technology in place, but it all comes together in the workflow. You’ll need to
develop a workflow that outlines each step of the process — from defining the business problem to collecting data
to developing models to deploying models. You’ll also need to ensure your workflow is repeatable, scalable and
consistently followed across all AI initiatives.

11
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 How do I get going? The four
key stages of the AI journey
To fully reap the benefits of AI and ML, think of it as a journey rather than a point implementation.
Our recommendation can be best summarized in a four-step journey: Hack It, Prove It, Nail It, Scale It.

STAGE 1: HACK IT

The ideation phase. Here, we recommend applying the ideation framework described in the “Building AI
Applications” section. This will help you carefully select a use-case with high feasibility and impact potential, then
have a very quick iteration to develop a prototype. It can help the team construct a line-of-sight to the solution.

STAGE 2: PROVE IT

The proof-of-concept phase. In this phase, we fully define the problem and set target acceptance criteria to
prove to business stakeholders that the selected problem can be solved with AI. Once this is done, we collect
and label data, train models and evaluate them against the acceptance criteria. The process is repeated until
the acceptance criteria is met. It is important to set the scope to a “minimum viable model,” something that
can eventually be used in a production workflow for a specific segment of your business.

STAGE 3: NAIL IT

The product-development phase. This is where we deploy the “minimum viable model” into your production
environment. We also ensure that all upstream and downstream processes are functioning as performed
and that business stakeholders are seeing ROI from the solution.

STAGE 4: SCALE IT

Once the AI solution has been validated in a sub-segment of your business, it is now time to expand the
scope of the solution to encompass the full spectrum of opportunities across the enterprise. We often see
several dozen team members involved in this phase, working across multiple business work streams under
a well-orchestrated AI Center of Excellence.

12
AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE
 Let's put AI to work for you!
Successful AI adoption begins with a clear vision. First and foremost, you’ll need to
understand the types of problems AI and ML can solve. This will help you identify your
key business objectives.

After you define the problems you want to solve, an understanding of what it will take
to get there is essential. You’ll need to optimize your technology environment, talent,
assets and workflow to set yourself up for success. Once the development work starts,
it’s important to take a measured approach to building, testing, refining and deploying
your solutions — and to make sure they can scale and bring value to various parts of
your organization.

There’s no better time to start that journey than now. As mentioned earlier, in this recent
MIT Sloan Management Review study4, 91 percent of respondents expect to derive new
business value from AI implementations over the next five years. The question you should
ask yourself is: In the spectrum of passives, experimenters, investigators and pioneers,
where do I want my business to be?

4. MIT Sloan Management Reviews 2018 Global Executive Study and Research Report on AI

SCHEDULE YOUR DEMO NOW

AI PLAYBOOK FOR THE ENTERPRISE 13

About the Author
Asif Hasan
Co-Founder, Quantiphi

Asif is the co-founder of Quantiphi, an award-winning applied AI

and big data software and services provider. He has over 15 years
of experience in technology services, healthcare and financial services
industries working on a variety of initiatives such as building applied
AI and advanced analytics capabilities at global scale, post merger
integration, supply-chain operations, business transformation
and professional services.