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Banpu Public Company Limited

Enterprise AI Adoption Based on Experience

Personally, the most important step is to set the definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your organization. Peter Norvig from Google defines AI as the designing and building of intelligent agents that perceives from the environment and take actions that affect that environment. AI is not just applying advanced analysis and logic- based techniques, like Excel, machine learning (ML), to support decision making. But AI also needs to automatically perform intelligent actions for humans. The definition of AI must be clearly agreed from all levels within the organization e.g., boards, management and operation. Otherwise, we will see confusion. For examples, I was asked to use Excel to perform loans and asset valuation with thousands of customers in real-time and users still want to edit and verify. Then, people showed me that they can do AI with Excel decision tables, solver, or linear regression. To me this is data analytics where people still want to analyze data, make judgements or conclusions about the information.

Generally, AI is expected to improve businesses. Thus, business benefits or AI objectives must be clearly quantified so that AI results can be measured. Consequently, all stakeholders can have the same business target. My past AI project goals were: reducing operational costs –how much in dollar (explicitly 1 million USD/year), improving customer experience (click-through-rate increased by 3 percent after 2 months) and increasing revenue by 10 percent of loans and deposits. These clear numerical objectives helped in implementing AI projects and tracking outcomes on annual basis.

There are business opportunities where AI can improve Banpu abilities to: increase productivity and operational efficiencies; save time and money by automating and optimizing our coal mining routine tasks; make faster business decisions by adopting AI techniques; minimize human errors on day-to-day operations; use vast amount of data so that we can identify cause and effect (causality) of interested outcomes.

Table 1 shows the framework which you need to consider and pay attention to, especially the bottom ‘Enabler Layer’ as we need resources to deliver. AI is a multi-discipline team that needs knowledge in Mathematics, Statistics, Calculus, Algorithm, Coding, and communication. As you are building the AI/ML team- you need to be excellent in the data domain and process, but you need to develop the data culture around such as working with stakeholders to show how AI can help bring the business values.

AI is not just applying advanced analysis and logic- based techniques, like Excel, machine learning (ML), to support decision making. But AI also needs to automatically perform intelligent actions for humans

Risks and drawbacks in adopting AI: expectations where there is an expectation AI can be implemented quickly. Sometime we may not be lucky to get the right model and accuracy. We need to make our expectations clear; data is not sufficient or quality of data is not met; executive and users are not supporting AI projects, as some users may resist or afraid of losing control/job; AI Security, fairness and ethics, these to be discussed at the early stages; corporate culture, such as meetings, presentations, trainings and administrative works which deprive AI engineers’ time to model, perform mathematical analysis, and code hundreds of computers in order to achieve business benefits. I hope with the trend of AI, we can expect organizations to adopt AI successfully and improve business benefits.
The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.