AI career tips from an AI generalist

There is much debate these days about whether it is better to be a generalist or specialist in terms of career opportunities and hiring strategies HBR: When generalists are better than specialists and vice versa.

At least as far as AI is concerned, I see a wealth of opportunities for both. The current global pandemic has turned the world on its head and put digital-first strategies at the forefront of many companies' minds. Will we see another AI winter like the previous ones? That I am doubtful of, as with swathes of data flying at us from all directions like meteors in space and too much data for any teams of people to analyse manually, plus advances in AI hardware, open source ML libraries readily available so that you don't need to implement a neural net from scratch and need a PhD in Deep Learning to do so, plus AutoML and the likes available to "citizen data scientists", AI no longer needs to be confined just to academia and the R&D labs of crazy geniuses.

What you do need though are people who can set realistic expectations for what can and cannot be achieved with AI & ML, people who can speak the business lingo and not talk about confusion matrices and precision and recall and random forest and gradient boosted trees to the "unconverted". Enter the AI Center of Excellence and the role of Business Advisor. Enter myself.

Does this AI Center of Excellence Business Advisor need to be a specialist? No

Do they need to understand what they are talking about and know all the high level concepts, like those wonderful buzzwords above? Yes

Do they need to be able to see opportunities all around them, determine their feasibility and potential scalability and then rally support and once approved by the Jedi masters, to take them to the specialists and business subject matter experts to determine how best to run a proof of concept? Yes

Does this role suit an ENTJ personality type like myself? Yes

Does this role allow you to carve out your own niche and be forward-looking by 2-5 years? Yes

Is this role people-facing? Yes

Is this role sales? No

Does this role allow you to stay very close and still be able to "tinker" with cutting-edge technologies, but yet not to get "bogged down" in the fine details that may not satisfy someone who thrives on networking and people contact and helicopter views rather than being in the weeds? Yes

The generalists like me, the ENTJs, the big picture people surely have an exciting place in AI for years to come where we can "do our thing", all whilst adding business value and avoiding "lost in translation" moments that often arise when you have specialists talking directly with business teams.

Background: Paul Janes started out his career in 2003 at the United Nations in Geneva as a Java programmer, and after travelling on exciting "missions" (UN term for work trips) to far off lands like Venezuela, Iran, Moldova, Jordan and Syria, he decided to leave the UN and join the private sector. He found himself in the Netherlands writing banking software and after cycling in almost every direction and finding not a single hill in sight, he decided to seek out mountainous Switzerland again. This time he was welcomed on the other side of the Röstigraben by the wonderful people of Zürich. From 2007 to 2014 Paul was a Java contractor at UBS but he felt something missing. Those long hours coding alone and not seeing how the firm operates as a whole made him decide something needed to change. He concluded an MBA was the answer and elected to pay a significant sum of money per letter for three letters after his name, but the experience aside from nearly sending him broke was an eye opener. There was more out there in the world for him than programming. He was deemed by the masters of above as "business savvy". After a short stint working in sales and business development for a digital sports startup (the Austria/Switzerland ClassPass equivalent), he navigated back to his "people" in UBS, adding business value in the RPA space. This then led to the most recent step of joining the AI Center of Excellence as a Business Advisor, almost 12 months ago to this day as we speak. And here we find ourselves back to the present day.....