Michael Krigsman and Andrew Ng Talk About AI For Everyone
/CXO Talk by Michael Krigsman is one of my favorite podcasts. Michael has a great eye for guests - especially around the future of work. Michael was recently joined by Andrew Ng of Landing AI. Andrew’s experience is broad and deep: Co-founder of Coursera, leader of Google Brain team, Chief Scientist of Baidu). I offer the outline of the episode below, but the key for me was the section where Andrew and Michael discussed their experiences with organizations that see AI education as being important across as well as and up and down the organization — not something just for technologists. Andrew shared (around minute 25):
I ran into a company a few months ago which told me that they were thinking of trying to get all 2,000 of their employees to take "AI for Everyone." I don't know if that's overkill, but I thought, "Wow, this is incredible because you get your team, certainly your executive team because that's really important, but then also others in the management level or an individual technologist to learn a bit about AI." Then that unleashes a lot of creativity as people that are close to your business can figure out where to apply supervised learning or other AI technologies.
Who Should Take AI for Everyone?
Andrew is enabling such a broad education around AI through his free Coursera course, “AI for Everyone.” I’m going through the course right now - I’m looking forward to the “Every job function needs to learn how to use data” and “AI and jobs.” Hoping to see some great examples of what I call 5T Thinking™.
Michael shared that the CEO of Nokia had seen the importance that AI will have, trained himself, created a course, and then asked all the engineers in the company to take the course.
Had I been listening in real-time, I would have tweeted to Michael and Andrew asking why the CEO would have only made the request to the engineers. As you may have seen in my earlier posts, I agree that there are different roles for adding AI to our work, but I strongly argue that you want both bottom-up as well as top-down participation in the process. Two heads, and more, are better than one when it comes to brainstorming on valuable applications of automation.
