AI may be the greatest opportunity of our time, with the potential to add nearly $16 trillion to the global economy over the next decade. But so far, adoption has been much slower than anticipated, or so headlines may lead you to believe. With this practical guide, business leaders will discover where they are in their AI journey and learn the steps necessary to successfully scale AI throughout their organization.

Authors Rob Thomas and Paul Zikopoulos from IBM introduce C-suite executives and business professionals to the AI Ladder―a unified, prescriptive approach to help them understand and accelerate the AI journey. Complete with real-world examples and real-life experiences, this book explores AI drivers, value, and opportunity, as well as the adoption challenges organizations face.

• Understand why you can’t have AI without an information architecture (IA)
• Appreciate how AI is as much a cultural change as it is a technological one
• Collect data and make it simple and accessible, regardless of where it lives
• Organize data to create a business-ready analytics foundation
• Analyze data, and build and scale AI with trust and transparency
• Infuse AI throughout your entire business and create intelligent workflows

Everybody’s talking about AI. Why? Well, we believe AI presents a tremendous opportunity for businesses of every size, across any industry. We believe AI is shaping (or will shape) future outcomes, automating decisions, processes, and workflows, enabling people to do higher value work, and reimagining new business models. We believe AI is a powerful tool for rethinking and reinventing businesses, not just squeezing a few extra percent out of tired processes. In fact, we don’t believe we’ll be calling it AI in the future in the same way that we don’t cite using a simple messaging service (SMS) to quickly communicate with someone anymore (we just say we “texted” them). Quite simply, artificial intelligence will become ambient intelligence…because AI will be doing its thing, in the background, unobtrusively, everywhere.

AI will lift and shift some companies into heights never imagined and will serve as a rift or cliff for others. AI will be the lifeblood of a company, helping it reimagine tired business processes, create new models, and super-charge reinvention; and in the uncertainty of these modern times, what business doesn’t need reinvention?

That’s why we developed the AI Ladder. It’s our proven methodology to help businesses succeed with AI—not just by updating a few old processes, but by re-creating themselves and doing business in a new way. It’s proven; it’s solid; it’s effective; and make no mistake about it…it works. You want to succeed. We want you to succeed. And that’s why we wrote this book.

Who This Book Is For

As we mentioned, everyone is talking about AI, so we wrote this book for business leaders who are (or are hearing others) talking about AI. You might be pretty informed on all aspect of AI or you might just be getting started and have little understanding of how it works, why it works, or how to implement and scale it successfully. We wrote it for all business leaders. Naturally it’ll really help those leaders who are not sure where to start, but we think our personal experiences will greatly benefit those who have started and are unsure where to go next or are not making the progress they’d hoped for. After all, why not learn from the mistakes we’ve seen and the mistakes we made so you don’t make the same ones?

This book requires no previous knowledge of AI. The topics we introduce will be helpful for a vast audience, ranging from business leaders, lines of business, as well as data scientists.

We’ve included success stories, but we also outline failures and challenges, and provide solutions to avoid or overcome them. The concepts you need to know to successfully scale AI across your business can be found in the following pages.

About the Author

Robert D. Thomas is Senior Vice President of IBM Cloud and Data Platform. He directs IBM’s product design and investment strategy, expert labs, global software product development, marketing and field operations across the company’s vast software portfolio.

Rob was previously the General Manager of IBM Data and Watson AI. Under his leadership, IBM has emerged as a leader in data and AI, spanning databases, data integration and governance, business intelligence, financial planning, data science and AI tools, and AI applications. Since joining IBM’s software unit, Rob has held roles of increasing responsibility and overseen 4 acquisitions by the firm, representing over $2.5 billion in transaction value.

Born in Florida, Rob earned his BA in Economics at Vanderbilt University and earned his MBA at the University of Florida, Rob serves on the board of Domus (Stamford, CT), which assists underprivileged children in Fairfield county.

Paul C. Zikopoulos is the Vice President of Cognitive BigData Systems at IBM. Paul has more than 23 years of experience in data, and is seen as a global expert in Big Data and Analytic technologies. Independent groups often recognize Paul as a thought leader with nominations to SAP’s“Top 50 Big Data Twitter Influencers”, Maptive’s “Top 100 Big Data Experts to Follow in 2016”, “Big Data Republic’s “Most Influential”, Onalytica’s “Big Data Top 100 Influencers and Brands”, and Analytics Week “Thought Leaders in Big Data and Analytics” lists. Big Data Made Simple noted him as one of the “Top 200 Big Data Thought Leaders on Twitter”, Technopedia listed him one of its “Big Data Experts to Follow”, and GreyCampus included him on their list of “150 Most Influential People in Big Data & Hadoop”. He has also been featured on "60 Minutes", speaking on the topic of Big Data, and advises various universities on their graduate-level analytics programs.

Paul has written hundreds of magazine articles and 19 books, including “Big Data: Beyond the Hype”, “Hadoop for Dummies”, “Harness the Power of Big Data”, “Understanding Big Data”, “New Dynamic InMemory Analytics for the Era of Big Data”, “Risk Free Agile Scaling”, “DB2 Certification for Dummies”, and “DB2 for Dummies. In his spare time, Paul is active in bolstering Women in Technology and is an advisory board member for Women 2.0, which works to close the gender gaps in tech companies. Paul enjoys all sorts of sporting activities (including the futile resistance and transformation into a “Horse Dad”). Ultimately, Paul is trying to figure out the world according to Chloë―his daughter, whom he notes didn’t come with a handbook and is more complex than the topic of BigData, but more fun too. Find him on Twitter @BigData_paulz.