Process Optimization Management:
Part 5.1 — Improve Phase / Defining A.I.

3 min readMar 7, 2021

This is the phase for which you all have waited for. You did your homework, have a clear understanding of your company and are ready to talk to outside A.I. outsourcing partners. By now you have a pretty good understanding why the previous steps were important and why you needed to invest time first to start strong with your outsourcing partner.

A.I. Scoping Workshop

Normally the first real meeting is an A.I. scoping workshop. This is mostly really fun, because many people come into contact with A.I. teams for the first time. The scoping workshop has many interactive elements and involves all important stakeholders from your side. The outsourcing partner will be very happy that you did such a wonderful job in getting your story straight beforehand, because now you all can dive deep into the actual topic: How can A.I. help you solve your problem.

Defining “Artificial Intelligence”

To answer this question, let’s talk about the term “artificial intelligence” first. Until now, we defined all our important processes and terms in our own company, but did we really define artificial intelligence? Do we all know that we are talking about the same thing? To be honest, it is not easy to define it and you will find hundreds of different approaches.

In this article we are trying a clean bottom up approach by dissecting the term “artificial intelligence”. Well, the word “artificial” is straightforward to be defined, meaning “something that doesn’t occur naturally”. By contrast, “intelligence” has been defined in many ways for the last hundred years in scientific circles. One good definition, by the psychologist Howard Gardner, focuses on problem-solving:

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings” (Gardner 1983).

Based on the above definitions, we could define A.I. as

a non-natural system that has the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings.

But based on this definition also programs like Excel could be considered A.I., because Excel has the ability to solve problems which are valued within our society. To make a distinction between Excel and true A.I., we will add one more component — learning. In comparison to “normal” software programs artificial intelligence has the ability to change and become better, the more data it is fed. It means, it is adaptable or as Darwin put it, it is fit. Many people mistake the meaning of fit (“survival of the fittest”) as strong, but in reality Darwin used fit in the meaning of adaptable. So our new definition of A.I. will be

a non-natural, adaptable system that has the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings

General vs. Narrow A.I.

Now that we have it defined for ourselves, we want to add one more distinction, because that confuses a lot of people. Especially when Hollywood talks about A.I., it showcases mostly “general A.I.”. General AI refers to machines with the ability to solve many different types of problems on their own, like humans can. General A.I. is the holy grail of A.I. research, but you can be sure, we are still a number of years away from general A.I. What you are probably going to discuss in your A.I. scoping workshop are narrow A.I. applications. As Kiron, 2017, puts it, narrow A.I. is defined as “a machine-based system designed to address a specific problem (such as playing Go or chess)”

In the next chapter (s.index below) we are going to continue talking about the A.I. scoping workshop.

If you are interested in A.I. leadership education or want to start your A.I. journey, just contact me at ansgar_linkedin@goldblum-consulting.com