Balasundaram’s own session tackled the critical challenge of scaling AI within global corporations to enhance decision-making. Moving beyond isolated pilot projects, it explored such topics as overcoming “pilotitis,” adapting to the AI landscape, maturing AI initiatives, impact assessments, and human-AI collaboration.
At your session, attendees gained practical guidance on scaling AI initiatives, maximizing their impact on business outcomes, and fostering a data-driven culture. What other elements did your session bring to FEI?
“Number one, there are very few conferences out there that address the topic of innovation both from a conceptual side as well as an applied side,” says Balasundaram. “What you have put together here in terms of the speakers, the content, the topics, they address both sides of it. The way you parceled out the days, especially at this meeting with the human intelligence component as the first one, the AI component tomorrow, and then the collective on the third, it just makes a lot of sense given where many of these trends on AI are going and the augmented decision-making we’re all talking about. That’s really what’s been great to be here and hear other people go through the same journey.”
Moving Forward, Collectively
Speaking of that, your session dovetails nicely into the collective intelligence theme of the conference. This concept of AI and human insights, working together. How do you find that plays out in the insights and innovation communities?
“We will always be after deeper insights in a novel way,” he says. “We want to uncover insights that are different, which we can act on in a differentiable manner when we launch brands and to be able to impact decisions under a cloud of uncertainty. We must do that now with remarkably more information and content than we had, let’s say, five years ago and to do it in half the time we had that. How do you bring all of that in? You can’t do it just as a human alone because we have confirmation biases. We tend to look within our echo chambers.”
He adds, “I think AI helps us to do that, but AI alone isn’t going to be able to drive that. So it’s going to have to be what is that optimal combination of the help we need but also preserving our judgment, looking at data and information in new ways, uncovering insights in a fundamentally new way, and driving a decision and impact much faster than we could. I think that’s the puzzle that we’re all trying to solve.”
Exploring During the Journey
In both insights and innovation, there’s the idea of this exploration and journey and really making an impact with decision makers. This morning, we had the rogue mindset presentation, how do you think that mindset coincides with the insights and innovation communities?
Balasundaram relates, “Where the rogue mindset is critical, especially when it comes to AI and its application and insights, is it really challenges this notion many practitioners have about going to the risks of AI first, without also in balance talking about its merits. What I think the rogue mindset does is you’ve got to be able to be assertive about what are the benefits in something you do. Yes, it has risks, but it’s very important to drill down to what are the important things that AI is doing. For example, it is helping us manage an overwhelming amount of content that we would not be able to do otherwise. It is allowing us to think about things in new ways because it just isolates patterns that go beyond the way we think about the universe.”
“Sometimes AI goes to bad places, and we know that,” he adds. “But it does occasionally allow us to explore domains that we wouldn’t have done anyway. That’s where I think the rogue mindset is really helpful in a conference on innovation, that it puts you in a mindset that is assertive, that is solution oriented rather than kind of being behind the eight ball in terms of seeing what happens and then going into it.”