Strategy Masterclass on AI by MMC Ventures

**Title:** Unlocking the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Business Growth | AI Masterclass

**Description:** Join Richard Potter, Founder and CEO of Peak, as he shares practical insights on developing an AI strategy and making it affordable for businesses. Discover how AI can revolutionize your organization’s performance and drive growth. Learn why understanding the domain, identifying problem domains, and leveraging AI’s capabilities are crucial steps in harnessing its transformative power. Increase your business’s profit margins and stay ahead of the competition in this AI-driven era.

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**YouTube Video Transcript:**

Okay thanks everyone nice to see you all as David said he’s an AI company just for a bit of background might be worth sharing who we are and what we do to start with so adds to the credibility hopefully we are a company whose mission is to help our customers do great things With data but specifically what we’re helping them do is productionize and operationalize AI in their business in the real world so hopefully this this talk can be a I don’t know a few practical hints on how you go about thinking about what you need to do from a strategy perspective And how you would go about formulating at an AI strategy that could make a real impact on on your business because that would be the point in doing it and we are a Manchester headquartered business so and we have about a hundred people in our team so it’s quite you know we’ve Been we’ve been part of the MMC portfolio for a while now and they’ve been a great help in helping us get to where we got to and quite proud of the fact that we’re probably like you know the outsider maybe the googles and the Facebook’s of this world probably the Biggest AI company in the UK now so that’s cool that isn’t all of our team that is supposed to symbolize that we can help everyone do great things with data okay so without further ado and why it’s important we think it’s important because I think David sort of modestly Put it there in the intro they’re like we’re in the AI era basically and it makes a transformative impact to business performance and every company in the world is gonna have to become driven by AI whether you’re a early-stage tech business or whether you are you know the world’s biggest Consumer products companies you’re gonna have to do it the impact that it makes according to our own slightly impartial research is that those who who are adopting AI technologies in their own businesses are growing 30% faster and their profit margins their gross profit margins are 50% wider so the halves are Already accelerating past the Habs not have-nots in that case so that kind of puts it in perspective I think but there is a problem and I think their guide actually funnily enough just as a slight aside the I think they I play books awesome independently almost exactly matches the approach you Know we would take to operationalizing a I’m given the nuts what we do for our customers I kind of feel like that has the credibility and the and the thing that the thing that we’re trying to address as a business and I think the AI PlayBook helps you think about these key Problems that you you want to do it because it’s really important but you know it’s difficult is hard to get your head around the technology sometimes like the technology space is developing really really quickly like secondly you’ve got a problem that existing business systems aren’t really the place To do AI certainly like my opinion our opinion as a business and I know other companies that have embedded AI you need a central place to to become almost your AI brain in the organization and that’s not like a line of business or a workflow product it’s not a data Warehouse or a data like it’s it’s own thing so so you need something different and then thirdly like getting the skills is quite tricky and they and you know they’re really in demand and that’s not just data science engineers who you know who understand AI are as important as Data scientists because data science is very different to AI it’s not a case of like you know it’s hard it’s it’s a different it’s a different case it’s different way of problem solving and so getting data scientists and engineers working together in fact it’s not not necessarily an easy thing either so that That applies just as much to engineering as des so that’s all well and good that’s why you might want to do it but about how so hopefully we can focus on the how how would we go about that if you’re wondering why there’s a picture Of a trainer shop there to focus on a customer of ours so it’s just crept into a corporate tech home okay so this is this is kind of like a sequential thought process on it first first of all I think you need to like understand the domain I understand AI machine learning and I know that sounds really daft but an obvious but it’s not that obvious to most business leaders and the reason for that is because most business leaders have got to where they’ve got to in an age I get the pre a I age yes they’ve got there by Being very good at job and the jobs usually processing information and making decisions and workflows and reporting usually always historical reporting and dealing with that as a data point what business leaders aren’t usually good at is thinking what could I do differently if I knew something that was going to Happen tomorrow today for example and so actually thinking about your entire business differently because you can use AI is something I think that business and leaders don’t know so we have to sort of teach the possibilities so so firstly like as a business leader or someone working you know in any business Think about like what can it do and a very handily stolen this and reformat at this table from the report which is on page 16 of your guide good with numbers so so yeah this is this is a handy little table that kind of like tells you Like what is a good out and I think it’s important to bear it in mind is is good at like generally four kinds of problem domains your assignment problems so like you know classification spotting patterns or correlation between between different things so some example use cases there at the top so for Identifying what something is like image recognition is a good example of that maybe sentiment analysis in text identifying how connected things are the next one down so maybe that’s you know propensity and and so on and then we’ve got grouping so like you know clustering really clustering is a good one for Things like identifying groups of customers that might be likely to churn or have propensity zin in a certain way or prefer certain products I haven’t copied this very well so a mister nm there generation so given a given input give me an output so a chatbot for Example is a good example of that and then and then the last one which can be quite like I think transformative to most businesses is forecasting so you know with time series data now we can forecast very accurately with machine learning models so that that makes you I Think that’s the to me actually kind of one of the first things that any business should really start thinking about because like we always look at historical reports what was our trading last week was trading the month before what about starting like what what’s our trading Gonna be next week in the week after and let’s do something about it now that’s a really obvious one so forecasting is pretty powerful I think in this world so so those are things it can do what it can’t do I sit in a lot of like workshops like Discovery workshops and and and stuff with potential clients and you have a lot of people who all say like oh yeah well what we could do is X…

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**Tags:**
artificial intelligence, venture capital, technology

**Sources:**
– [AI Masterclass: Richard Potter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID)
– [MMC](https://www.mmc.co.uk/)

At MMC’s recent AI Masterclass, Founder and CEO of Peak, Richard Potter, answers questions including, how do I develop an AI strategy? And, how can you make AI affordable?