101: Avi Goldfarb - Why Should AI Matter to You?
Will AI machines destroy humanity as we know it? Actually, quite the contrary. AI matters to the everyday business owner more than they might know. There’s a lot to be learned in prediction technology and today’s guest shares advice on how you can use this knowledge to grow your marketing and sales potential.
Avi Goldfarb is the Ellison Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi is also the author of Prediction Machines, which he will be discussing on today’s show!
In 2012, there were only a couple of companies at the time that were calling themselves AI companies. However, that slowly grew and by 2015, Avi had seen a huge increase of at least 50 companies being created a year. Avi and his co-authors decided to investigate and research what this technology meant for our modern society.
The Mosaic web browser made the internet accessible to the general population, but it took us about a decade to figure out how to really commercialize it. Avi believes the same will hold true with AI. We are going to see businesses use AI tools in various ways to solve key problems.
Although AI will not improve the general intelligence of your company, prediction is still really, really valuable. Why? Because it cuts down on all the unknown variables in your decision-making process when you are faced with uncertainty. Through prediction, you can be much more confident (and you have the data to prove it) on what’s the correct direction to take your business in.
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