10 Keys to AI Success in 2023

Contents

Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 3

1 Assess Your AI Readiness................................................................................................................... 4

2 Deliver Business Alignment............................................................................................................... 9

3 Enable Trackable and Reliable AI Outcomes..................................................................................... 13

4 Understand ROI................................................................................................................................... 17

5 Reduce Bias......................................................................................................................................... 23

6 Retain, Upskill, and Scale Talent........................................................................................................ 26

7 Utilize Multimodal and Persistent Data............................................................................................ 29

8 Make Decisions and Execute.............................................................................................................. 32

9 Build Deep Technological Alignment................................................................................................. 37

10  Take Data Preparation Seriously........................................................................................................ 40

2

Introduction
The AI landscape is changing rapidly.
While some businesses still view AI as a novel concept,
a large number of organizations recognize it as a
technology that is having a positive business impact.
Over 90% of enterprises already attribute a portion of
their revenue to AI.1 Similarly, McKinsey suggests that the
share of organizations reporting at least 5% of earnings
before interest and taxes (EBIT) that’s attributable to
AI experienced a growth spurt in 2021 and remained
relatively stable in 2022, at around 25%.2
This ongoing maturing of the market means that
more and more organizations experience pressure to
continuously deliver results and show value from AI.
According to Gartner, by 2025, roughly 55% of enterprises
will be at the stabilization stage of AI—a stage marked by
the growing number of production-grade AI projects, a
more coherent collaboration amongst internal teams to
deliver operational excellence around AI, and increased
support from C-suite to drive these initiatives. With these
evident trends, it is safe to say that we’re entering
1
DataRobot, Research Report: AI and the Power of Perception, July 19, 2022
2
 cKinsey & Company, The state of AI in 2022—and a half decade in review, Michael Chui, Bryce Hall, Helen Mayhew, Alex Singla, Alex Sukharevsky,
M
December 6, 2022
3
Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, Worldwide, Alys Woodward, Anna Griffen, Alan Priestley, Jim Hare, Eric Hunter, Kevin
Quinn, October 20, 2021
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023
INTRODUCTION
the era of value-driven AI, an era embodied by a
commitment to measurable value from each AI project
that helps any organization grow and optimize its business.
However, the apparent growing utilization of these
technologies doesn’t automatically mean that enterprises
are having a smooth ride. Many issues still plague
AI projects, and some of them are universal across
industries and regions. Accountability issues, lack of
transparency, and technical complexity, along with the
inability to retain talent, show actual ROI, and deliver
business alignment all contribute to AI stagnation.
AI progress is hard, but you don’t have to get stuck in
an endless loop of inertia. With this list detailing how
organizations can improve their AI maturity and readiness,
you can enter 2023 with solid action items to tackle
some of your toughest business problems and enable AI
success for years to come.
3
Assess Your
AI Readiness
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 1

ASSESS YOUR AI READINESS

Assess Your AI Readiness

For organizations looking to build and scale their AI Enterprises know what they want AI to deliver:
initiatives, there is a seemingly infinite variety of AI
solutions. From revenue predictions by store location and • Measurable business value and robust ROI
department to forecasting of cloud storage, employee
• Models that meet regulatory and
attrition, credit risks, operational costs, and granular SKU-
compliance demands
level demand, there are hundreds of potential AI use cases
in every single industry. • Explainable insights that drive a better
understanding of their business and
Industries from healthcare and automotive to banking and
corporate risks
finance are pursuing the proper implementation of AI to
take advantage of the best AI solutions and realize their While it does take a sophisticated understanding of AI
transformative potential. Yet, AI is complicated, and many and ML to deliver tangible benefits to the business, AI
enterprises are still figuring out how to implement and readiness truly starts with well-established, clear business
gain value from the technology. objectives. Don’t fall into shiny new toy syndrome.
Organizations that want AI to be truly transformative
Before organizations can ask if their AI investments are
must understand their business objectives. A shipping
generating real ROI, they need to ask themselves a more
company that wants to implement AI to improve trailer
basic question: Is our organization truly ready for AI?
unload prioritization, optimize fuel burn, predict truck
Organizations can fall anywhere on the AI readiness arrival and departure delays, and clear up bottleneck
scale—with most currently in the awareness phase and locations is a good example of a company that has
only a handful making it to the transformational phase. precise business goals.
Many assume that the technology itself is the main
obstacle, but the organization’s entire environment is
essential—from upskilling staff and improving resources
to synthesizing systems and tools.

5
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 1

ASSESS YOUR AI READINESS

Understanding AI Readiness Stages
While there are numerous ways to interpret and understand AI readiness, there are five basic levels that represent
the majority of organizations.

01
AI Interest—Still Searching
Level
The enterprise is interested in starting a dialogue about AI, but not in a strategic manner, and pilot projects and
experiments are not taking place.

02
Experimenting with AI
Level

Meetings regarding AI focus on knowledge-sharing and the inception of standardized conversations. AI begins
appearing in proofs of concept and even pilot projects.

03
Standardizing—AI in Production and Creating Value
The enterprise has at least one AI project that is updated continuously and has moved to production, and experts
Level

and technology are accessible across the enterprise. AI has an executive sponsor and a dedicated budget. Machine
learning is part of the day-to-day functions and is being used to assist with some information processing tasks.

04
Systematizing—AI is Used Pervasively to Create Value
Level

All new digital projects at least consider AI, and new products and services have embedded AI. A mature AI flow serves
as a basis for decision-making and is centrally managed with a standardized AI platform and processes.

05 Transformational AI
Level

AI is part of the DNA of a business and AI is being scaled throughout the organization with a prescriptive approach.

6

Organizations that fail to properly gauge their level of AI
readiness are bound to slow down their journey toward
becoming an AI-driven enterprise.
In order to produce accurate machine learning models,
you need the right data at your disposal. Organizations
need to seek out and ensure appropriate data quality
and data enrichment processes. And for that to happen,
businesses need a good understanding of their data
and its lifecycle. You can’t work with data that you don’t
even know exists, and you can’t build a coherent data
management process without understanding the full
lifecycle of that data. This journey is often bottlenecked by
siloed teams, each one working off of their spreadsheets
or even segregated databases that aren’t exposed to the
rest of the business.
Virtually all organizations, even the ones that consider
themselves to be mature AI adopters, run into similar
problems. There are many ways of tackling these issues,
but the first step toward a solution is admitting that
there’s a problem.
Organizations at lower AI readiness levels (Level 1,
Level 2) may need to focus on establishing processes
and infrastructure that can help them “fail fast” with AI.
These companies will be spending a lot of time playing
catchup, since their competitors might already be
exploiting AI to their advantage.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 1
ASSESS YOUR AI READINESS
Organizations at these levels often need to do a lot of
foundational work, which includes, but is not limited to:
• Start foundational conversations with internal
stakeholders about their AI strategy
• Build a better understanding of the “art of the
possible” with AI and where it can be applied
within the organization and, more importantly,
whether there’s enough data or problems to
tackle with AI
• Seek out industry expertise, success stories,
and insights that might guide them in the
right direction
• Figure out whether they have the tools and the
people to kick off the actual implementation
or whether they need to advance their
understanding of potential AI projects before
considering operational aspects, like the
availability of data science talent
Enterprises at higher AI readiness levels (Level 3, Level 4,
Level 5) may need to focus on operational components,
advanced automation, talent retention, and internal
horizontal alignment on AI, as it’s being implemented in
more and more business units across the board.
7
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 1

ASSESS YOUR AI READINESS

Organizations at these levels often look at more specific
problems, since they have already been exposed to AI
and its capabilities. These include, but are not limited to:

• Improving automation throughout the ML

lifecycle, from data preparation to model
deployment, monitoring, and management.

• Broader push for a nuanced understanding of

ML capabilities across their whole organization,
which includes horizontal alignment between
business units, facilitated by knowledge
sharing, strategy meetings, internal consulting,
AI evangelism, and frameworks to analyze
AI performance.

• Wider application of employee engagement

practices aimed at improving collaboration
among all participants engaged in building and
managing AI projects.

• The growing need to understand, measure, and

analyze key performance indicators associated
with AI and its business impact.

• Continuous improvement of the AI ecosystem,

which can manifest itself through technological
standardization, application sophisticated
cloud-based tools, and infrastructure that
supports AI at scale.

8
Deliver Business Alignment
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 2

DELIVER BUSINESS ALIGNMENT

Deliver Business Alignment

In uncertain economic times, data science teams
responsible for AI might still be seen as cost centers
that are ripe for structural change. Unless these teams
transparently align their goals and performance with
business outcomes, the result of this misalignment
might be what we are now seeing in the marketplace—
layoffs that affected job categories that were previously
considered to be safe.
Layoffs in early 2023 ranged from 7% to 33% of the
workforce in specific cases and include data-oriented
roles.4 A microcosm of this trend can be seen in the
reduction in force at two companies, which affected data
scientist, data engineer, and data analyst roles at junior
and senior levels, and made up about 4% of the layoffs.5
In this environment, data science and analytics teams
have to be hyper-aligned with specific business and C-level
goals, as high-performing organizations are nearly eight
times more likely to spend at least 20% of their technology
budgets on AI.6 So, teams that fail to achieve alignment
with business goals might be on the chopping block.
There’s also a strong argument to be made that alignment
and collaboration around value is simply the most logical
strategy. Analyst research suggests7 that by 2025, CDOs
(Chief Data Officers) who establish value-stream based
collaboration will noticeably outperform their peers
in driving value.

4
George Anadiotis, “The data science and AI market may be out for a recalibration,” ZDNET, June 13, 2022
Ibid.
5

6
 cKinsey & Company, The state of AI in 2022—and a half decade in review, Michael Chui, Bryce Hall, Helen Mayhew, Alex Singla, Alex Sukharevsky,
M
December 6, 2022
7
Gartner, Essential Guide to Prioritizing Data and Analytics Around Value, Pieter den Hamer, 2022 10
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 2
Tactics for Building

DELIVER BUSINESS ALIGNMENT

Business Alignment
Alignment and collaboration may come in many
different forms. It could be an informed AI strategy that Ongoing AI Strategy Reviews Collaborative Use Case
is vetted by relevant business owners or sound use case by Business Managers Brainstorming Sessions
prioritization, advised by business users who understand Participants Participants
the goals and potential outcomes of the project. Business leaders, data science leaders, business managers Business leaders, data science leaders, IT/ DataOps leaders

Alignment can also mean education of business Led By Led By

Business leaders Data science leaders
and IT users around limitations and capabilities of AI
(i.e., data availability, infrastructure, types of problems
AI can tackle, level of automation that can be achieved,
etc.), which, in turn, can drive more focused AI initiatives.
Each organization needs to establish a suitable process
that ensures tight coordination between business and
analytics teams. Let’s take a look at some of the tested
practices that can help organizations achieve these
Internal Education Around Capabilities, AI Use Case Tracking that Helps Identify the
results today. Limitations of AI Specific ROI of Each Use Case
Participants Participants
This is not an exhaustive list and may vary from ANYONE involved in the collaborative process ANYONE involved in the collaborative process
organization to organization, especially around
Led By Led By
stakeholders and leaders for these efforts. Some
Business leaders Data science leaders
organizations may choose to develop tactics that
are completely different from the ones outlined. For
example, some larger enterprises create Centers of
Excellence (CoE) for AI and hold internal advisory
committees to oversee the whole strategy.

But the basic premise is simple. An AI strategy

and its implementation is a collaborative process Business Stakeholder Interviews Quotas and KPIs for Business Units,
that should involve various stakeholders from various by Data Science Leaders Centered Around AI Strategy, Use Cases,
business, analytics, and infrastructure teams. It
or Data Scientists and Implementations
should be aligned on goals, technical capabilities,
and limitations imposed by infrastructure, business Participants Participants
Business leaders, data science teams, business managers ANYONE involved in the collaborative process
needs, budgets, and other inputs.
Led By Led By
Data science teams Business leaders

11
Enable Trackable and
Reliable AI Outcomes

Enable Trackable and Reliable AI Outcomes
Even the most aligned and collaborative organizations
run into the same issue: scalability. There are many
issues plaguing organizations that are entering the
scalability phase of their AI journey, but some of the
biggest ones are around accountability and predictability.
Many questions should be answered to avoid the
scalability bottleneck.
• Who is responsible for model governance
and documentation?
• How is model versioning handled?
• How do we identify, retrain, and replace
underperforming models?
• Will current model monitoring capabilities
support dozens or hundreds of models?
• What is the deployment lifecycle? Who’s
responsible for the deployment process?
• How do we ensure regulatory compliance of
our models once they’re in production?
8
AI Infrastructure Alliance, AI Infrastructure Ecosystem, 2022
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 3
ENABLE TRACKABLE AND RELIABLE AI OUTCOMES
Potential issues like these are just the tip of the iceberg.
The reality is that many organizations fail to deliver the
necessary infrastructure experience. This experience
is akin to trying to drive a Formula 1 car on a back road
where the ride is very bumpy and things start to fall apart
quickly. It’s impossible to track and reliably predict AI
outcomes in such conditions.
Many organizations are acutely aware of these problems.
According to the AI Infrastructure Association (AIIA),
around 20% of organizations are dissatisfied with their
AI infrastructure, and only 26% are very satisfied with it.
But the problem becomes even more profound when
we look into the ultimate measure of infrastructure
quality—model deployment timelines. This is because
most of the actual value is generated when the models
are live in production, this is the point where AI is helping
make business decisions. Based on the same AIIA report,
over 40% of organizations cannot deploy a model into
production quicker than two months, with almost half of
them taking from six months to a year to deliver.8
13

Delivering Excellence
Organizations looking to seriously apply AI to drive
crucial business decisions have to ensure that their AI
strategy includes robust infrastructure capabilities. Most
often, this means creating a Center of Excellence for Al
artifacts with the help of machine learning operations
(MLOps) capabilities.
Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) is a set of technologies
and practices that provide an automated, scalable, and governed
means to rapidly deploy and manage machine learning (ML)
applications in production environments.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 3
ENABLE TRACKABLE AND RELIABLE AI OUTCOMES
MLOps can enable accountable and predictable
outcomes throughout the ML lifecycle. A dedicated
and robust MLOps infrastructure for AI projects allows
organizations to maintain accountability through
governance, model versioning, and model performance
monitoring. It minimizes AI’s footprint through leaner
teams and the standardization of processes, tools, and
teams around a single MLOps process and system. This
minimizes disruptions during scale-downs and scale-ups
inside organizations.
A robust MLOps practice allows many industries to
maintain compliance during complex market conditions by
solidifying their model risk management practices—not just
in financial services but in other regulated industries as well.
14
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 3

ENABLE TRACKABLE AND RELIABLE AI OUTCOMES

Tools of the Trade
It’s important to identify tools and platforms that
can support such an infrastructure. Many standalone
solutions will require a lot of development overhead
to build an end-to-end solution. That’s why many
organizations don’t use in-house tools for MLOps
primarily. Today, only 20% of organizations build their
infrastructure in-house, while over 75% use a mix of
internal and external tools or external tools exclusively.9
This is not a surprise. There are many benefits for
organizations that decide not to waste internal budgets,
development cycles, and support resources to create in-
house infrastructure capabilities.
External tools are usually geared towards software (ML)
engineers, data scientists, and DevOps/ IT, as these
are the primary teams tasked with integrating models
into the organization’s business-critical workflows and
applications. These platforms often provide everything
needed to put machine learning models into production
and serve as the single source of truth for all AI initiatives,
delivering a centralized system to test, document, deploy,
integrate, monitor, and govern models.
Keep in mind the following high-level concepts when
building out your infrastructure or selecting tools to
support it:

Opting for open-source tools only means delaying the scalability bottleneck, as, at a certain point,
1 supporting them in-house will become identical to building and maintaining your infrastructure, just
like with any sufficiently complex software product.

Seeking strong governance for production use cases, either through an in-house or external solution,
2 should be paramount for any organization utilizing MLOps tools.

Measuring AI cycles to ensure rigor and best practices around AI should become the cornerstone
3 of your infrastructure efforts. This can be achieved with appropriate tools for model monitoring,
continuous model retraining, challenger model analysis, and CI/CD methods applied to the ML lifecycle.

9
AI Infrastructure Alliance, AI Infrastructure Ecosystem, 2022 15
Understand ROI

Understand ROI
While building alignment and infrastructure around AI is
incredibly important, enterprises should be laser focused on
outcomes. Too many organizations are in the exploratory
phase with AI and have not established proper procedures
Exploratory AI
Exploratory AI can be broadly identified as AI
projects or strategies that don’t have a clear
use case prioritization, processes around rapid
hypotheses testing, or defined understanding
or focus on value. It can sometimes be referred
to as “academic AI,” since it focuses on the
research of tools and methodologies, without
prioritizing business outcomes, (e.g., revenue or
process optimization). However, outcomes of
exploratory AI may later be used for actual value
creation, through applied AI systems (i.e., value-
driven AI) derived from these exploratory efforts.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 4
UNDERSTAND ROI
and metrics to track the ROI of their AI projects.
An environment that prioritizes exploratory AI breeds many
issues on the path to determining ROI.
Value-Driven AI
Value-Driven AI includes tools and processes
that are primarily focused on business results
and enterprise-ready AI capabilities. It is highly
contextual to the business and its industry,
as it seeks to deliver outcomes through the
organization’s data, which always reflects
the business. It aims to encompass the
entire lifecycle from machine learning (ML)
experimentation to deployed models and live
production environments, with the ultimate goal
of delivering ongoing value for the organization.
17

Prioritization
Many organizations don’t have a clear understanding
of use case priority, which often creates resource
misalignment. In such situations, teams get out of
sync, and it might take time to refocus and spend
their resources wisely.
Iteration
Too often, analytics teams don’t have well-established
processes or tools to support rapid hypothesis testing.
Ultimately, this leads to longer time-to-value or missed
opportunities, as some teams opt for “tried and tested”
approaches to save time.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 4
UNDERSTAND ROI
Misdirection
Analytics teams are often focused on novel applications
of AI, which rarely have proven business value. This could
be driven by certain hype around these applications or by
business leaders, who are willing to buy into the hype.
And while exploring relatively exotic neural networks and
their potential business impact can be a great R&D project,
it might not have the same immediate impact on the
bottom line as a simpler solution for risk scoring based on
XGBoost, for example. Such teams might be too focused
on exploratory AI, as opposed to value-driven AI, where
the use cases are well-documented and delivered by
many other data science teams.
Other teams might be chasing the “golden goose,”
trying to deliver the hardest and most complex use
cases and solutions out there. The problem here is that
these use cases might be poorly explored or documented
because they are rarely attempted and successfully
delivered due to their complexity. It’s hard to deliver the
promise of value-driven AI where value has not been
generated before.
18
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 4

UNDERSTAND ROI
Value-Driven AI for ROI
When transitioning to the value-driven AI phase, it’s
essential that data science teams move away from
exploratory AI that’s focused on hyped-up use cases and
applications with no clear path to success. Otherwise,
data science teams will continue to be perceived as cost
centers, as opposed to becoming revenue centers.

This leads to potential roadblocks for any AI project

or strategy:

• Cost centers are the first to experience

reductions during downturns and restructuring.

• Scaling AI and proving its value becomes even

harder as the impact is hard to showcase, with
projects taking months or even years to deliver.

• Securing future projects from internal clients

becomes more complicated as ROI is nowhere
to be seen.

Only by focusing on ROI can organizations mitigate these

and many of the associated issues. The ability to assess
this potential ROI is what sets apart AI leaders, 72% of
whom are able to make these assessments successfully.¹0

19
10
P wC, PwC 2022 AI Business Survey, Bret Greenstein, Anand Rao, 2022
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 4

UNDERSTAND ROI
Start with the Value
When figuring out the best problems to solve, remember
to keep your eyes on the prize and focus on potential
value. But always keep in mind that value doesn’t have to
be expressed as a direct revenue or monetary gain. It can
be something that tangibly improves business operations,
such as:

• Scoring leads in your sales pipeline can help
prioritize the best leads and speed up the
pipeline, ultimately leading to shorter sales
cycles and more ARR.
• Understanding critical manufacturing processes
by predicting potential failures can minimize
waste and production defects.
• Anticipating patient conditions can help develop
preventative treatments, improving outcomes
and saving resources.
• Understanding your customers through churn
predictions can lower attrition and boost the
bottom line.

Whatever the problem may be, you always need to

have an understanding of how the impact is expressed.
Are you saving money? Are you bringing in more money?
Are you saving time or company resources?

This can also be expressed on a more granular level

when organizations seek to understand the cost of false
positives for their machine learning models and their
predictions and how much an improvement would save
them. Some tools already include payoff matrices that
allow you to incorporate the cost of such false positives
into your analysis.¹¹

DataRobot Documentation, Profit Curve

11
20
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 4

UNDERSTAND ROI
Focus on the Benefits
Prioritize what can have the biggest benefit for the
business. From there, figure out which applications of AI
are feasible from a technical standpoint. Then figure out
where the gaps are in your tech stack that may prevent
you from achieving those goals.

Routine Is Good
Build out a strategy that’s based on value, as opposed
to exploration. Value-driven AI often encompasses use
cases that some might consider routine, like credit risk
predictions or customer lifetime value estimations. But
addressing these kinds of quotidian dilemmas is what’s
going to drive the real value. While exploratory AI has
important applications as it drives innovations and future
gains, you should try to strike a balance. A good rule of
thumb is to spend 80% of your resources on value-driven
Al, while 20% can be dedicated to exploratory AI.

Manage Scale
Organizations need to acknowledge that scalability issues
may arise from both the inability to scale up, as well as the
inability to scale down. Neither of these should break the
value generation process. A proper MLOps infrastructure
needs to be in place to enable flexibility.

21
Manage and Mitigate Bias

Manage and Mitigate Bias
Enterprises rely heavily on the quality of predictions. One
of the often overlooked components of predictions is bias
mitigation—ensuring that potentially biased input datasets
don’t result in potentially biased predictions. It’s a problem
that businesses are prioritizing, as bias can directly—and
negatively—affect a business. According to the DataRobot
2022 State of AI Bias survey, 36% of respondents say
their organizations have suffered due to an occurrence
of AI bias in one or several of their algorithms. Of those
organizations, 62% lost revenue and 61% lost customers.¹2
Respondents also report on reputational and ethical risks
associated with AI bias.¹3 Enterprises admit that their
organizations’ algorithms have inadvertently contributed
to gender discrimination (32%), age discrimination
(32%), racial discrimination (29%), sexual orientation
discrimination (19%), and religious discrimination (18%).
Organizations need to understand that AI is only as smart
as the information it has been trained on. Although it might
be mathematically impossible to create a model that
doesn’t have at least some bias built in, it’s important that
12
DataRobot, 2022 State of AI Bias Report
13
Ibid.
14
Cornell Law School, Protected Personally Identifiable Information (Protected PII)
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 5
MANAGE AND MITIGATE BIAS
enterprises always strive to improve and incorporate more
fairness and have techniques in place to quickly identify
and correct bias that is present in the algorithms.
Imagine this scenario. An AI system is trained to become
a judge based on data from previous court rulings. Will it
be fair and objective or replicate the discriminatory nature
of past judgments? We probably all know the answer to
this question. This system is very likely to follow a pattern
aligned with previous court decisions, with the same
biases as human judges had. The AI will always rely on
the quality of supplied data, and that data will often have
a human footprint.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bias mitigation
is a multidimensional problem that also takes into
consideration the types of data that organizations collect
and the ways this data is used to create algorithms.
For example, using specific personal information that
is considered to be a protected class (Protected PII),
like gender and race, poses ethical risks.¹4
23
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 5

MANAGE AND MITIGATE BIAS

These issues directly affect business performance.
Minimizing AI bias not only protects organizations from
corporate and reputational risks, it also allows businesses
to build predictions for the real world. A good example
of this is ensuring that your marketing campaigns aren’t
skewed towards a certain consumer profile that isn’t
truly your target market. This can also inadvertently lead
to promotional targeting that focuses on just one or
two consumer groups, while completely ignoring other
lucrative markets. When this happens, you can experience
a significant drop in your marketing effectiveness and ROI.
That’s why working to remove AI bias is an important
component of both internal and external trust in the
enterprise. Employees delivering outcomes with these
models need to be sure that they’re making a positive
impact, and customers affected by these models want
to know that they’re not discriminated against.
According to the same 2022 AI Bias survey, only 1% of
organizations aren’t taking any steps to avoid AI bias. Is your
organization one of them? Luckily, there are many standard
approaches to tackling AI bias that practically any business
can implement.

Actions to Avoid AI Bias

• Ensure data quality and sanitized datasets for your models.

• Train employees to recognize AI bias so they can prevent the wrong data from being ingested into your
analytics pipeline.

• Hire an AI bias expert to identify weaknesses in your analytics and data collection practices.

• Control decision-making processes to ensure that potentially questionable data or modeling outcomes
aren’t being used to make pivotal business decisions.

• Monitor data changes to ensure that inappropriate data types aren’t being introduced to your models even
after they’re deployed.

• Employ tools and practices that detect and mitigate potential bias throughout the analytics lifecycle.

• Introduce capabilities that facilitate the explainability of your models by providing blueprints for your
models, which explain how the data was used, how it was permuted, and how the model incorporates this
data into its outcomes.

24
Retain, Upskill, and Scale Talent

Retain, Upskill, and Scale Talent
In market conditions when many businesses choose to
optimize operational costs, the data science and analytics
functions can suffer a lot. Given that data scientists and
machine learning leads are compensated on the higher
end of the pay scale, organizations may choose to part
ways with these people to free up a significant amount
out of their operational budget. What organizations don’t
realize is that such decisions can hurt the business
in the long run, putting organizations at a
competitive disadvantage.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, data
science jobs are projected to grow 36% over this decade.¹5
This is a strong indication of the steadily growing demand
for machine learning and AI capabilities within the
enterprise. At the same time, 35% of organizations see
the internal shortage of skilled people who can optimize
AI as one of their biggest barriers to AI success.¹6
In a paradoxical situation, while data science talent is in
demand and is recognized as vital to AI success, some
organizations choose to part ways with these crucial
employees in order to lift their bottom line. If companies
instead retain existing data scientists, they stand a strong
chance of improving their team’s performance, and
augmenting their skills with the right tools and capabilities.
15
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Data Scientists, September 8, 2022
16
DataRobot, Research Report: AI and the Power of Perception, July 19, 2022
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 6
RETAIN, UPSKILL, AND SCALE TALENT
Data science talent is especially crucial in times of
uncertainty. These people are educated and highly sought
after, especially those with expertise in specific industries.
It’s not as easy as scaling down data science efforts
today and then simply hiring someone down the road.
Organizations might find it hard to find people with the
right expertise in the future, since the market
is very demanding and your business might have
unique challenges, like specialized data types or
unconventional tech stacks.
But at the same time, organizations that decide to retain
their data science capabilities need to realize the need for
scale and augmentation. Many data science teams can
only deliver a handful of projects per year, with some of
them yielding minimal business impact. Data scientists
need to be able to scale their experiments to start
delivering value on a broader scale—failing fast, testing
new algorithms, exploring exotic data types, and trying out
specialized machine learning techniques. Otherwise, their
full potential might not be realized.
26

Maximizing the Value of Your Talent
The simplest way to maximize your data science investments is by ensuring that your team has the necessary tools at their
disposal to deliver results. There are numerous automation and augmentation tools available that can help organizations
achieve this, but there are many prerequisites that these systems need to truly deliver long-term results.
Experimentation
ML tools have to flexibly deliver code-first and no-code/
low-code capabilities to ensure that all of your data
science team can comfortably work in an environment
that suits them best. Some of them might prefer a Jupyter
Notebook for their code. Others might enjoy minimal
coding, focusing on the business problem itself. There are
merits to both approaches, as long as they’re available for
people to use them.
Production Lifecycle
Capabilities that enable dozens or even hundreds of live
models are crucial for any enterprise-grade data science
organization. Usually, such capabilities are delivered
throughout the data science lifecycle and include
governance, model deployment, and model monitoring
tools that allow data scientists to interact with IT, DevOps,
and data engineering teams to streamline and scale AI.
Compliance and Governance
Your data science tools need to be able to support a
variety of automated model performance tests and
document model behavior for compliance to ensure that
models are managed to the highest standards, meet
government regulations, and reduce overall risk from
access or changes to models in production.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 6
RETAIN, UPSKILL, AND SCALE TALENT
Ecosystem
Any tool that doesn’t play well with external systems could
slow down the progress of your data science projects.
These limitations might reveal themselves in different
forms, but it’s important to recognize them before making
the decision. There are simple questions that you need to
ask before committing to a solution:
• Does the tool support a wide variety of cloud
deployment options such as Amazon AWS,
Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud? ? Will we
be able to deploy the solution on-premises if
required by our security and regulatory policies?
• How does this tool integrate with business
intelligence tools like Microsoft Power BI,
places where most of the tool’s output will be
consumed by business users?
• Does it have broad integrations with the most
important data sources that our enterprise
uses? (e.g., Snowflake, SAP, Amazon RedShift,
Google BigQuery, etc.)
• Will it be able to support the robust ecosystem
of service integrations like GitHub or
Apache Airflow?
27
Use Multimodal and Persistant Data
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 7

USE MULTIMODAL AND PERSISTENT DATA

Use Multimodal and Persistent Data

To deliver on the promise of AI, organizations need to
utilize the full breadth of the main resource that’s fueling
AI—their data. It’s important to ensure that complementary
data types (i.e., multimodal data) are used in conjunction
to deliver results.¹7 This allows organizations to maximize
their chances of achieving impact with AI, as there’s a
variety of data types that can be used to feed machine
learning algorithms: geospatial, textual data/documents,
visual/image data, and more.
The basic concept is simple. A doctor wouldn’t just look at
a patient's history chart (i.e., text data). They will also use
their MRI images (i.e., visual data) and other data types
to deliver a diagnosis. Just like in this example, machine
learning models might benefit from the introduction of
new data types to derive as much signal for predictions.
There’s strong evidence that a multimodal approach to
machine learning significantly improves the accuracy
of insights.¹8
Different data types unlock different types of insights and
opportunities for AI:
• Geospatial data enables granular regional
predictions that can be used for population
health forecasting or store location predictions.
• Text data enables organizations to tap into their
vast stores of documents to analyze content
from court decisions to resumes.
• Image data enables specialized use cases
where the image features can additionally
inform the model, like predicting a property’s
value based on its photos or assessing auto
insurance claims with supplemental image
data indicating damage.
• Sensor data enables industry-specific
applications in a variety of manufacturing
scenarios used to predict equipment
performance or production defects.
• Synthetic data is artificially generated to mimic
the real world and alleviate the lack of real data
for machine learning models.¹9
At the same time, the data you use, along with the AI
infrastructure through which the data flows, should not be
bound by specific environments. Ensuring a multi-cloud,
flexible approach to deployment allows organizations to
better control their data security, data persistence, and
business flexibility.

17
Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, Use of Multimodal Data and Machine Learning to Improve Cardiovascular Disease Care, April 27, 2022
18
Nature, Multimodal machine learning in precision health: A scoping review, November 7, 2022
19
Anyverse, Tesla bets on the physically correct synthetic data at its AI Day, September 9, 2021 29
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 7

USE MULTIMODAL AND PERSISTENT DATA

It’s not always about the availability of multiple clouds.
It can be about the application of tools that can work
with many different environments and their various
combinations. Businesses need to take advantage of
cloud capabilities and data sovereignty to ensure the long-
term flexibility and resilience of their AI projects.

When selecting tools for your data science and machine

learning initiatives, be sure to learn whether these tools
offer multiple cloud options, have hybrid cloud capabilities,
and offer managed cloud capabilities, which can greatly
decrease the resource intensity of your AI strategy.

The majority of organizations have already made cloud decisions:

89% of organizations already have a multi-cloud
strategy in place and 79% are already using multiple
public cloud offerings.²0

20
Flexera, 2022 State of the Cloud Report
30
Make Decisions and Execute

Make Decisions and Execute
Many organizations struggle to operationalize models, as
it can take months to deploy them into production and
integrate them with consumption-level environments. But
just as many of them struggle to fully reap the benefits of
these deployed models and make sense of all their data.
Research suggests that the inability to bring data together to make
accurate decisions has a sizable impact on the bottom line, as
44% of organizations report customer experience and retention
problems associated with this analytics lifecycle problem.²¹
Quantexa, Data in Context: Closing the Data Decision Gap (Global Research)
21
22
PwC, PwC 2022 AI Business Survey, Bret Greenstein, Anand Rao, 2022
23
Gartner, 12 Data and Analytics Trends to Keep on Your Radar, Laurence Goasduff, April 5, 2022
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 8
MAKE DECISIONS AND EXECUTE
On top of that, outside of highly mature users of AI, less
than 20% of organizations use AI to improve decision-
making.²2 According to Gartner research, around 33% of
large organizations will have analysts practicing decision
intelligence, including decision modeling, in 2023.²3
There’s no purpose for any AI strategy if it doesn’t include
the consumption, execution, and decision layers. A machine
learning model is only useful when people utilize its output
to make decisions, update processes, improve performance,
and optimize the customer experience. So, what can
organizations do to ensure that consistent decision-making
practices are applied to their machine learning projects to
deliver real business value?
32
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 8

MAKE DECISIONS AND EXECUTE

Automation
Making your business successful is not about
micromanaging and weighing in on each and every
decision, especially when AI is involved. The more you
scale your AI efforts, the more decisions have to be made
because of the ever-growing pool of ML outputs. This is
when maintaining a micromanaged manual approach
to decision-making becomes impossible. There are simply
too many decisions of varying degrees of complexity for
a human to process.

In order to keep their momentum, organizations scaling

their AI efforts need to introduce automation into their
decision-making flows. There are different approaches
to this, but it boils down to building rules within systems
that are fed predictions, where predictions under or over
a certain threshold are managed according to a specific
protocol. Now, this may seem like a basic concept as
it’s already being applied in many systems, but you’d be
surprised to learn how many AI projects are unfortunately
not in that category.

Automation comes in many forms and flavors.

Sometimes, AI is paired with robotic process automation

(RPA) tools to deliver varying degrees of automation, like
identifying critical customer complaints and forwarding
them for immediate investigation. Some machine
learning lifecycle tools provide built-in capabilities that
allow organizations to embed AI output into end-user
applications so specialists can make informed decisions
in real time.

33
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 8

MAKE DECISIONS AND EXECUTE

Observability

To make decisions you need to be able to observe models
in their production environment, as it’s not always about
the decisions around the outputs of the models. It can also
be about the models themselves and their performance.
Many organizations lack visibility into the deployment
behavior and performance of models that are in
production. Tracking the integrity of a machine learning
model in production is critical.
The concept of model observability aims to deliver a
granular understanding of errors occurring with model
performance in production, as well as the context for
those errors.²4 The goal is to have answers for a number
of questions, which could inform error mitigation tactics
through deep model diagnostics:

• What else was going on in the production • Which specific predictions were impacted
environment when the model exhibited the error? by the error?

• Was the whole batch of predictions affected by • How did the error impact the overall velocity
the error or just one? of predictions?

• At what specific time did the error occur?

This can be achieved in numerous ways. For example, by

tracking data drift, prediction data, training data, and custom
metrics, organizations can maintain their understanding of
model performance and how it's affected by the real world.

24
DataRobot, Resilient Machine Learning with MLOps, January 2023 34
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 8

MAKE DECISIONS AND EXECUTE

Consumable Apps
In many enterprises, the outputs of machine learning
models aren’t always integrated into the business. Too
often, due to the inability to deploy models, the valuable
insights generated by these models stay hidden to the rest
of the organization. In other cases, there’s simply no path
to display these outputs, as the machine learning lifecycle
isn’t integrated with the business consumption layer.
So, for example, if your organization is a power user of a
major business intelligence (BI) tool like Microsoft Power
BI or Tableau, there might be no process or oversight
around how the machine learning output is integrated
into these BI environments.

To combat these issues, enterprises can build out internal

capabilities to make this final step possible through
business engineering or analytics functions. This could
be as simple as integrating these deliverables into the
machine learning lifecycle. For example, a project cannot
be considered final until a deployed model is available for
consumption through internal BI tools or a custom app is
accessible to employees. In some cases, tools employed
by the analytics team already include features that allow
organizations to build these quick and easy applications
that can easily be visible to the rest of the organization.²5

25
DataRobot, AI Applications 35
Build Deep Technology
Ecosystem Alignment

Build Deep Technology Ecosystem Alignment
Integrating AI into existing IT processes and infrastructure
is crucial for organizations looking to scale and achieve
success with their AI initiatives. Data science and IT teams
often speak to each other in different languages. For
example, data scientists might create models in Python/R,
because these are primary data science languages. At
the same time, the IT team might predominantly use Java
to build its applications. It’s also entirely possible that
organizations have models used by different business lines
that run in different and completely separate environments.
Due to this disconnect, AI infrastructure can be complicated.
From manually crafted models and machine learning
pipelines and manual model maintenance to low visibility
into production and limited governance—creating a complex
end-to-end AI lifecycle can be a tangled web of technologies,
dependencies, and tools.
26
AI Infrastructure Alliance, AI Infrastructure Ecosystem
27
BARC, Driving Innovation with AI: Getting Ahead with DataOps and MLOps, June 2, 2022
28
IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation 2022 Predictions
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 9
BUILD DEEP TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM ALIGNMENT
On top of that, the majority of AI-enabled organizations are
still struggling to stay atop the ever-expanding repository of
production models. According to AIIA, 37% of organizations
are managing up to ten models, 21% are managing up to
twenty five, and 7% are trying to manage over a hundred.²6
The technological smorgasbord of tools necessary to
support the ML lifecycle is further complicated by the
growing number of models, which could be written in many
languages. The problems could be further exacerbated
by the need to maintain a complicated compliance
workflow, depending on the industry where the models are
applied. The alternative would be to drown in technological
complexity and technical debt.
37
 10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 9

BUILD DEEP TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM ALIGNMENT

Unification
To prevent deployment delays and deliver resilient,
accountable, and trusted AI systems, many organizations
invest in MLOps capabilities to monitor and manage
models, while ensuring appropriate governance. According
to BARC, organizations that adopt such management and
governance tools are better able to plan their projects, as
they are 4.2 times more likely to be able to deploy their
models quickly and 3.5 times less likely to be confronted
with projects with overwhelming complexity.²7

By implementing MLOps tools and practices,

organizations can quickly and efficiently stand up a
centralized management hub for machine learning
operations and production AI. MLOps allows organizations
to put ML into production quickly through repeatable,
scalable processes that unify the production environment
and minimize friction between data science, IT, DevOps,
and data engineering teams.

IDC predicts that by 2024, 60% of enterprises

will have operationalized their ML workflows
by using MLOps.²8

BARC, Driving Innovation with AI: Getting Ahead with DataOps and
27

MLOps, June 2, 2022

IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation
28

2022 Predictions 38
Take Data Preparation Seriously

Take Data Preparation Seriously
According to an outdated misconception, data scientists
spend 80% of their time on data preparation. While that
legendary statistic is far from the truth today, recent
reports indicate that it’s still one of the most resource-
intensive parts of the data science workflow, taking up
almost 40% of a data scientist’s time.²9
Further, the absence of an integrated set of capabilities to
discover and connect to data, clean and transform data,
and identify the right signals in data slows iteration. Quite
often, data preparation and building models are not treated
as mutually inclusive as they should be. This leads to a
loose, or even non-existent, feedback loop between these
two phases of a machine learning project. The outcomes
of that are decreased productivity, increased total cost of
ownership, and fewer insights from data.
29
Anaconda, State of Data Science Report 2022
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 10
TAKE DATA PREPARATION SERIOUSLY
Additionally, it is becoming increasingly necessary for data
science leaders and teams to use data prep tools that
utilize the security, compliance, and financial controls of
their own cloud data warehouse or lake.
Therefore, optimizing the data preparation process can be
the key to unlocking value and efficiency for AI projects in
an environment where data scientists have to be hyper-
focused on results and maintain a high level of productivity,
There are several tactics that could help data science
organizations scale their data preparation efforts.
40

Building Bridges
Data science teams need to work with organizations
upstream to supply data and ensure that it’s as close to
the final format as possible. People closest to the original
source of the data can have an immense impact on data
quality and integrity, especially in circumstances where
the data is collected and entered manually by employees.
Tight Feedback Loop
AI Builders should ensure there is a tight feedback loop
between the data prep and modeling phases of any
machine learning project. This ultimately results in high-
quality data being fed to models eventually leading to
accurate and robust models.
Change Comes from the Top
Business leaders should invest their time in
understanding the data and find ways to accommodate
data science teams in their pursuit of data. For example,
there’s a variety of ways to set up a collaborative process
that oversees the cleanup and processing of data before
it gets to the data science team. This could be a targeted
project or a company-wide set of data quality standards.
10 Keys to AI Success in 2023 10
TAKE DATA PREPARATION SERIOUSLY
Better Together
Analytics leads and business leaders need to work
together to find ways of enriching the data before it gets
to data scientists. Sometimes, a new field in the CRM
could be filled out by marketing or sales and could provide
unparalleled insights, as long as there’s an ongoing
process of discussing and discovering these potentially
missing insights. There are also plenty of external sources
that can plug into existing data preparation workflows
to enrich the data.
Automation Is Key
Automation should be applied to data preparation
processes whenever possible. There are multiple paths
for this, either enabled through open-source or enterprise-
grade tools. Automation enables rapid prototyping or
rapid experimentation environments that let organizations
fail faster and deliver accurate solutions quicker.
Overall, data preparation is a significant portion of the
analytics workflow, and efforts to improve it should be
baked into the process whenever possible.
41

Summary
An organization’s path to AI success depends on a lot of
factors, but starting with an appropriate assessment of
its AI readiness should be the first step. Going through
this assessment can help build a better understanding
of the most pressing gaps in its AI strategy and uncover
potential solutions for them.
At the same time, aligning business with the AI teams is
crucial in enabling AI projects that deliver trackable and
reliable AI outcomes, with clear visibility into the ROI.
This is applicable to any organization, no matter where
they fall on the AI maturity scale.
Meanwhile, more mature organizations need to focus
on ensuring trust in AI and reducing potential bias, while
retaining and improving internal AI and data science
talent. This effort needs to be supported by deep
Start your journey to value-driven AI today
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10 Keys to AI Success in 2023
SUMMARY
technological alignment between data science, business,
and infrastructure teams to ensure frictionless execution
of the AI strategy.
However, there are some practical tactics and measures
that any organization can adopt to drive AI success.
These include the use of multimodal data and application
of tools that automate the data prep portion of the data
science lifecycle, enabling an even faster time to value
since data prep is still one of the most resource-heavy
processes within the AI lifecycle. All of this needs to be
underpinned by automation in decision-making flows that
allows it to execute faster on the information delivered
by AI, minimizing the decision-making window and
streamlining outcomes on the path to AI success this
year and beyond.
42
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