# How to Fail at AI Strategy: Hamel Husain & Greg Ceccarelli Channel: AI Engineer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89aQ7T6cMwA Duration: 17 min Language: English Words: 2597 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/89aQ7T6cMwA --- [0:00] [Music] all right everyone welcome Hamil and I are absolutely thrilled to be here with you to basically teach you how to build the definitive guide to completely utterly and spectacularly mess up your AI strategy I actually couldn't have really wished for a better foil Grace's lead in than this because we're not just talking about Minor setbacks here we're going to take you through a way to create full-blown company crippling career ending failure Grace talked about best practices but we're here to embrace worse practices in fact we're going to make sure you know how to completely torpedo your projects and ensure you alienate everyone that you work with how [1:06] does that sound it sounds great to me um so before we begin it might as well start with some introductions um we Have No Agenda here it's just a sequence of steps but I'm Greg I'm an executive leader and I've spent years in the SE Suite crafting AI strategies I'm now a co-founder of an AI startup but previously I was the chief product officer at plural site and ex executive leader at other companies um and I've had a front row seat to how executive teams can transform clear strategic opportunities into labyrinthine disasters and I'm Hamill I'm a machine learning engineer and independent consultant who has worked with many [1:47] companies on AI I've witnessed every conceivable way AI strategies can fail and I found it really fascinating how creative people can get with their failures that's right so you could say that together we're kind of like the dream team of disaster we've advised or maybe we've you know interacted with representatives from numerous companies we haven't even have this fancy website um but for today's presentation we've decided to live and breathe the great words of the late Charlie Munger who said invert always invert so let's get started all right the first step to failure is to make sure that you begin to divide and conquer your own [2:30] company this is key if you're destined to fail you got to embrace the disconnect between willingness to pay price and cost the keys to creating value by contemplating unreasonable goals and you should especially everyone here in the audience know by now you you have to make sure you go and attend every AI industry conference right but never go back and talk about what you learned with your team the point just like Moses here parting the red SE is to create impenetrable silos and incentivize secrecy between your teams so let's get into it so I talked about the value stick and willingness to pay in the the prior [3:15] slide but here it's really important for us to adhere to the anti-value stick you got to embrace it because it's the opposite of everything good and useful when it comes to Value creation and being strategic and today that's our guiding principle you might be thinking that wtp means willingness to pay but here it's wishful thinking promises you got to tell your customers that AI is going to do absolutely everything for them your new systems are going to write their emails block their dog solve climate change and achieve world peace but don't really worry about the details just promise the moon you know about price right well for us that's another [3:54] acronym particularly ridiculous infrastructure costs everywhere I mean that was a mouthful sorry uh buy the most expensive gpus don't bother with any cost benefit analysis just max out the company credit card think of this as an investment in something and cost well it's that Cascade of spectacular technical debt you're about to run headlong into um you need to think about Building Systems so convoluted so intertwined that even you as an executive can barely understand it you know about job security right this is a key to guaranteeing it think about it this when it inevitably breaks no one's there except for you and finally if you know about value you know about [4:42] WTS or willingness to sell for us it's why this system well the answer and I mean always is because AI there's never any further explanation needed no board is ever going to question you it's like magic but much more expensive and less reliable so step two here is when you start to Define your strategy right here's the first key fake any diagnosis you might be thinking of grab last year's annual report or operating plan and just start highlighting random paragraphs preferably the ones you understand the least and declare a must fix this don't bother talking to anyone who actually does the work in your guiding policy should be [5:27] both incredibly ambiguous and vague something like become the global AI leader in everything except don't Define what everything means that's someone else's problem totally and your action plan simple you need an AI powered SEO tool that guarantees top Google search results even if you sell garden gnomes right and a generative art plug-in that creates nfts of your CEO's cat and of course an AI drone lunch delivery service because Synergy uh announce all of this at your next company All Hands meeting and you get both bonus points if you wear a shiny suit and use the word disruptive at least a dozen times and the last point on this slide [6:07] is about timelines but timelines are for companies that intend to finish projects what we recommend is you Embrace Perpetual beta just create a massive backlog in GitHub and stick all those highlighted Financial reports into that Greg was mentioning earlier great strategy but you know what strategy really works just create a 4,000 page document that you post in all your slack channels and just erode people's willpower to engage with the material and with these tidal wave of documents um you know in words Greg isn't there a strategy that you have about jargon there certainly is the point is to communicate in such a way that nobody understands drown everyone [6:50] in a tsunami of jargon say things like our multimodal agentic Transformer based system leverages F shot learning and Chain of Thought reasoning to optimize the synergistic potential of our Dynamic hyper hyper parameter space if you say it with confidence you probably will have absolutely no idea what you just said Remember the goal is to look incredibly smart even if nobody understands a word you're saying the key is obfuscation yeah you might be tempted to do something like defining a very cogent clear business on a page approach like in the in in the advantage but never be too tempted one of the most effective ways to cause [7:33] dysfunction in your organization is to use jargon everywhere and use jargon strategically to hide the jobs to be done for example I had a mental health client instead of saying we need to write a prompt we would just say hey we're building agents and what that did is it made sure that the mental health experts were not in the room and didn't know how to participate and that's exactly the result you want that's right just like haml reduced those mental health experts mental health I like to do that as well so instead of saying hey let's make sure the AI has the right context I just talk about Rags and don't [8:17] say make sure users can trick the AI into doing something bad just say prompt injections yeah and the key here is to encourage Engineers not the people who might best understand your customers to write prompts because what could possibly go wrong look we know that translating everyday English language into jargon can be really difficult so we made this guide for you and this guide will help you divide your organizations just like Greg was talking about earlier just like Moses the link is right here but remember making everything even writing prompts seems super technical and Out Of Reach for everyone is what you want to go for all right just a brief recap we [9:01] talked about how to seed your your division how to start to Define your strategy how to communicate it now we're on to mobilization right because you got to do something with that giant backlog well some of you might know about Jeffrey Moore but I've never heard of him today we're pioneering a very new revolutionary framework which is about zoning to lose it's designed specifically for failure just randomly assign AI tasks to people with absolutely no relevant experience for example Outsource your data review to Offshore Q&A teams who have very little context about your business yeah and most importantly you might be tempted to use the incubation [9:41] Zone to bootstrap new AI ideas but the goal is to launch from here completely untested bug written AI chat Bots directly to your customers as Hamill mentioned never worry about beta testing dis disregard quality assurance just ship it straight to production because what's the Worst That Could Happen outside of a potentially career- ending PR disaster so if you do it sort of right should feel something like South Park um you're going to yank all your best Engineers from potentially supporting your Revenue producing products wait a while and then profit no actually it's going to feel more like total collapse and because you're so disorganized we can now transition [10:27] to look and this this point your organization is in complete disarray but it's time to do the deed and burn it all to the ground so the most effective way to start doing this is to focus on tools not processes and those problems that you created earlier and other ones that may exist don't analyze them don't try to understand them just throw tools at them so if you're rag system isn't retrieving the right documents just buy a new more expensive Vector database yeah and if you need to measure progress just use every off-the-shelf evaluation metric you can possibly find never bother customizing them to your business [11:07] needs just blindly trust the numbers even if they make no sense oh and like you know we're talking a lot about agents today if they're not working just pick a new framework and vendor F tune without any measurement or evaluation just assume it's going to be better because it's kind of like Alchemy with a lot more electricity exactly you don't need to look at our design metrics evals that's a vendor problem just plug in a tool and it will solve all your problems Greg I really love how you demonstrated exactly what we're going for here with whacko every time you see a problem hammer it with a [11:48] tool if another problem comes up Hammer that with a tool the same problem comes again Hammer with a different tool you get the point yeah H I really appreciate being meme F to help you get get your point across look I want to emphasize you should adopt a mindset that evals are a vendor problem just realize that there should be a one siiz fits-all solution let the vendors figure it out you're too busy being an executive and if you really want to do this properly you need to create a dashboard that looks like this with every off-the-shelf metric that you can gather the more metrics the better it [12:35] doesn't matter if the metrics track with outcomes or real failure modes make sure the numbers are unintelligible so you don't know the difference between a 3.5 and a 4.5 keep hoarding random metrics until you find one that's going up and to the right then you can claim success and look maybe you might have a hard time figuring out where you can come up with these generic metrics but we got you just adopt the ones from eval Frameworks in fact adopt all of them let your eval metrics guide you blindly and never ask whether they actually measure success again the more numbers you have the better yeah I personally like to [13:17] optimize for cosign similarity BL and Rouge ignoring actual user experience and I said it once and I'm going to say it again never cross check with domain experts or your users because if an LM says it's accurate who are we to argue we are their humble servants after all amen now it's time to unveil the most potent Technique we have in our toolbox and it's avoid looking at data seriously just avoid it keep a blindfold next to you at all times you Happ to bump into Data by accident put that blindfold on yeah data that sounds really messy let's let a tool handle it because you can [13:58] absolutely 100% % trust the ai's output without ever looking at it yourself looking at data that's an engineering problem you're a leader you have more important strategic things to do like having meetings about meetings besides developers they always have more domain expertise than your business teams yeah and we know that ultimately by this point your customers are really your best Q&A and hopefully you have lots of them and don't complain if something is wrong maybe eventually but more importantly you got to trust your gut it got you this far in life right and feelings are always reliable substitute for data especially when you're making million-dollar decisions if you have trouble trusting [14:47] your gut just put the blindfold on and it'll get you right back in touch with those feelings so now we know by we know by now that Engineers are all coding Wizards and they're going to handle everything thing it doesn't really matter if they haven't spoken to a customer in years because you can quickly forget about the fact that there might be simpler options like using spreadsheets to annotate and look at data say after me remember this is beyond me great advice and just it's not enough for you not to look at the data you have to make sure no one else is looking at data and [15:24] the best way to do that is to put your data in complex systems that only Engineers can access and it's not available to domain experts right so like instead of using a simple spreadsheet or perhaps an air table like up on the screen as an executive you should insist on buying a custom data analysis platform that requires perhaps a team of phds to operate and understand remember those bonus points you get more of them if it takes six months to load this thing and errors incessant so there you have it the ultimate foolproof guide in under 20 minutes to achieving total AI failure if you follow this advice that [16:05] we've given you here meticulously it's guaranteed that you're going to waste time resources and alienate all the people you work with and as far as I'm concern that's the ultimate success that you can have sure is so for more advice it's actually real do visit ai- exec um we also have an O'Reilly book the same material coming out February 27th uh and so while this talk was inverted you know our lived experience really isn't and we're always very eager to help you on your journey so find us after this presentation the Q&A speak grp thanks so much [Music] --- 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