
2
Andrew Ng
1. Execute pilot projects to gain
momentum
It is more important for your rst few AI projects to succeed rather than be the most valuable AI
projects. They should be meaningful enough so that the initial successes will help your company
gain familiarity with AI and also convince others in the company to invest in further AI projects;
they should not be so small that others would consider it trivial. The important thing is to get the
ywheel spinning so that your AI team can gain momentum.
Suggested characteristics for the rst few AI projects:
• It should ideally be possible for a new or external AI team (which may not have deep domain
knowledge about your business) to partner with your internal teams (which have deep
domain knowledge) and build AI solutions that start showing traction within 6-12 months.
• The project should be technically feasible. Too many companies are still starting projects that
are impossible using today’s AI technology; having trusted AI engineers do due diligence on
a project before kickoff will increase your conviction in its feasibility.
• Have a clearly dened and measurable objective that creates business value.
When I was leading the Google Brain team, there was signicant skepticism within Google (and
more broadly, around the world) of deep learning technology. To help the team gain momentum,
I chose the Google Speech team as my rst internal customer, and we worked closely with them
to make Google Speech recognition much more accurate. Speech recognition is a meaningful
project within Google, but not the most important one—for example, it is less important to the
company bottom line than applying AI to web search or advertising. But by making the Speech
team more successful using deep learning, other teams started to gain faith in us, which enabled
the Google Brain team to gain momentum.
Once other teams started to see the success of Google Speech working with Google Brain,
we were able to acquire more internal customers. The team’s second major internal customer
was Google Maps, which used deep learning to improve the quality of map data. With two
successes, I started conversations with the advertising team. Building up momentum gradually
led to more and more successful AI projects. This process is a repeatable model that you can use
in your company.
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