The AI Product Manager's Handbook: Develop a product that takes advantage of machine learning to solve AI problems
()
About this ebook
Product managers working with artificial intelligence will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to applied AI. This book covers everything you need to know to drive product development and growth in the AI industry. From understanding AI and machine learning to developing and launching AI products, it provides the strategies, techniques, and tools you need to succeed.
The first part of the book focuses on establishing a foundation of the concepts most relevant to maintaining AI pipelines. The next part focuses on building an AI-native product, and the final part guides you in integrating AI into existing products.
You’ll learn about the types of AI, how to integrate AI into a product or business, and the infrastructure to support the exhaustive and ambitious endeavor of creating AI products or integrating AI into existing products. You’ll gain practical knowledge of managing AI product development processes, evaluating and optimizing AI models, and navigating complex ethical and legal considerations associated with AI products. With the help of real-world examples and case studies, you’ll stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving field of AI and ML.
By the end of this book, you’ll have understood how to navigate the world of AI from a product perspective.
Related to The AI Product Manager's Handbook
Related ebooks
The Machine Learning Solutions Architect Handbook: Create machine learning platforms to run solutions in an enterprise setting Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Art of Data-Driven Business: Transform your organization into a data-driven one with the power of Python machine learning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArtificial Intelligence for Process & Product Innovation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImplementing AI Systems: Transform Your Business in 6 Steps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArtificial Intelligence For Business - A Comprehensive Guide to AI Integration: Series 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInterpretable Machine Learning with Python: Learn to build interpretable high-performance models with hands-on real-world examples Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeep Learning with Azure: Building and Deploying Artificial Intelligence Solutions on the Microsoft AI Platform Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGenerative AI Transformation Blueprint: Byte-Sized Learning Series, #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe AI Playbook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsActive Machine Learning with Python: Refine and elevate data quality over quantity with active learning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrinciples of Data Science: A beginner's guide to essential math and coding skills for data fluency and machine learning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEngineering MLOps: Rapidly build, test, and manage production-ready machine learning life cycles at scale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArtificial Intelligence for Business Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAI-Powered Commerce: Building the products and services of the future with Commerce.AI Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIlluminating Pathways: Navigating the Enterprise Ecosystem Through Decision Intelligence and Generative AI Focused on Prioritization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHands-On Data Preprocessing in Python: Learn how to effectively prepare data for successful data analytics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOperating AI: Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Business Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFeature Engineering Made Easy: Identify unique features from your dataset in order to build powerful machine learning systems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPractical Predictive Analytics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHands-On Machine Learning for Cybersecurity: Safeguard your system by making your machines intelligent using the Python ecosystem Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Data Modeling & Design For You
Raspberry Pi :Raspberry Pi Guide On Python & Projects Programming In Easy Steps Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mastering Agile User Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Data Visualization: a successful design process Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thinking in Algorithms: Strategic Thinking Skills, #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Secrets of ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Non-Developers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Data Analytics for Beginners: Introduction to Data Analytics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spreadsheets To Cubes (Advanced Data Analytics for Small Medium Business): Data Science Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPractical Data Analysis Cookbook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBayesian Analysis with Python Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Data Analytics with Python: Data Analytics in Python Using Pandas Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Managing Data Using Excel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5R: Data Analysis and Visualization Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tableau Cookbook – Recipes for Data Visualization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWordPress For Beginners - How To Set Up A Self Hosted WordPress Blog Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5AI-Driven Data Engineering Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLearn T-SQL Querying: A guide to developing efficient and elegant T-SQL code Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings150 Most Poweful Excel Shortcuts: Secrets of Saving Time with MS Excel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Concise Guide to Object Orientated Programming Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAutoCAD® Pocket Reference Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMastering Python Design Patterns Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKafka in Action Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPostgreSQL for Data Architects Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMachine Learning Interview Questions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5DAX Patterns: Second Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The AI Product Manager's Handbook
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The AI Product Manager's Handbook - Irene Bratsis
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
The AI Product Manager’s Handbook
Copyright © 2023 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author(s), nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Publishing Product Manager: Dinesh Chaudhary
Senior Editor: Tazeen Shaikh
Technical Editor: Rahul Limbachiya
Copy Editor: Safis Editing
Project Coordinator: Farheen Fathima
Proofreader: Safis Editing
Indexer: Pratik Shirodkar
Production Designer: Alishon Mendonca
Marketing Coordinators: Shifa Ansari and Vinishka Kalra
First published: February 2023
Production reference: 2230223
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-80461-293-4
www.packtpub.com
For those courageous enough to believe they deserve their heart’s desires… evermore.
– Irene Bratsis
Contributors
About the author
Irene Bratsis is a director of digital product and data at the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI). She has a bachelor's in economics, and after completing various MOOCs in data science and big data analytics, she completed a data science program with Thinkful. Before joining IWBI, Irene worked as an operations analyst at Tesla, a data scientist at Gesture, a data product manager at Beekin, and head of product at Tenacity. Irene volunteers as NYC chapter co-lead for Women in Data, has coordinated various AI accelerators, moderated countless events with a speaker series with Women in AI called WaiTalk, and runs a monthly book club focused on data and AI books.
About the reviewer
Akshat Gurnani is a highly qualified individual with a background in the field of computer science and machine learning. He has a master’s degree in computer science and a deep understanding of various machine learning techniques and algorithms. He has experience working on various projects related to natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning. He has also published several research papers in top-tier journals and conferences and has a proven track record in the field. He has a passion for keeping up to date with the latest developments in their fields and has a strong desire to continue learning and contributing to the field of artificial intelligence.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part 1 – Lay of the Land – Terms, Infrastructure, Types of AI, and Products Done Well
1
Understanding the Infrastructure and Tools for Building AI Products
Definitions – what is and is not AI
ML versus DL – understanding the difference
ML
DL
Learning types in ML
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Semi-supervised learning
Reinforcement learning
The order – what is the optimal flow and where does every part of the process live?
Step 1 – Data availability and centralization
Step 2 – Continuous maintenance
Database
Data warehouse
Data lake (and lakehouse)
Data pipelines
Managing projects – IaaS
Deployment strategies – what do we do with these outputs?
Shadow deployment strategy
A/B testing model deployment strategy
Canary deployment strategy
Succeeding in AI – how well-managed AI companies do infrastructure right
The promise of AI – where is AI taking us?
Summary
Additional resources
References
2
Model Development and Maintenance for AI Products
Understanding the stages of NPD
Step 1 – Discovery
Step 2 – Define
Step 3 – Design
Step 4 – Implementation
Step 5 – Marketing
Step 6 – Training
Step 7 – Launch
Model types – from linear regression to neural networks
Training – when is a model ready for market?
Deployment – what happens after the workstation?
Testing and troubleshooting
Refreshing – the ethics of how often we update our models
Summary
Additional resources
References
3
Machine Learning and Deep Learning Deep Dive
The old – exploring ML
The new – exploring DL
Invisible influences
A brief history of DL
Types of neural networks
Emerging technologies – ancillary and related tech
Explainability – optimizing for ethics, caveats, and responsibility
Accuracy – optimizing for success
Summary
References
4
Commercializing AI Products
The professionals – examples of B2B products done right
The artists – examples of B2C products done right
The pioneers – examples of blue ocean products
The rebels – examples of red ocean products
The GOAT – examples of differentiated disruptive and dominant strategy products
The dominant strategy
The disruptive strategy
The differentiated strategy
Summary
References
5
AI Transformation and Its Impact on Product Management
Money and value – how AI could revolutionize our economic systems
Goods and services – growth in commercial MVPs
Government and autonomy – how AI will shape our borders and freedom
Sickness and health – the benefits of AI and nanotech across healthcare
Basic needs – AI for Good
Summary
Additional resources
References
Part 2 – Building an AI-Native Product
6
Understanding the AI-Native Product
Stages of AI product development
Phase 1 – Ideation
Phase 2 – Data management
Phase 3 – Research and development
Phase 4 – Deployment
AI/ML product dream team
AI PM
AI/ML/data strategists
Data engineer
Data analyst
Data scientist
ML engineer
Frontend/backend/full stack engineers
UX designers/researchers
Customer success
Marketing/sales/go-to-market team
Investing in your tech stack
Productizing AI-powered outputs – how AI product management is different
AI customization
Selling AI – product management as a higher octave of sales
Summary
References
7
Productizing the ML Service
Understanding the differences between AI and traditional software products
How are they similar?
How are they different?
B2B versus B2C – productizing business models
Domain knowledge – understanding the needs of your market
Experimentation – discover the needs of your collective
Consistency and AIOps/MLOps – reliance and trust
Performance evaluation – testing, retraining, and hyperparameter tuning
Feedback loop – relationship building
Summary
References
8
Customization for Verticals, Customers, and Peer Groups
Domains – orienting AI toward specific areas
Understanding your market
Understanding how your product design will serve your market
Building your AI product strategy
Verticals – examination into four areas (FinTech, healthcare, consumer goods, and cybersecurity)
FinTech
Healthcare
Cybersecurity
Anomaly detection and user and entity behavior analytics
Value metrics – evaluating performance across verticals and peer groups
Objectives and key results
Key performance indicators
Thought leadership – learning from peer groups
Summary
References
9
Macro and Micro AI for Your Product
Macro AI – Foundations and umbrellas
ML
Robotics
Expert systems
Fuzzy logic/fuzzy matching
Micro AI – Feature level
ML (traditional/DL/computer vision/NLP)
Robotics
Expert systems
Fuzzy logic/fuzzy matching
Successes – Examples that inspire
Lensa
PeriGen
Challenges – Common pitfalls
Ethics
Performance
Safety
Summary
References
10
Benchmarking Performance, Growth Hacking, and Cost
Value metrics – a guide to north star metrics, KPIs and OKRs
North star metrics
KPIs and other metrics
OKRs and product strategy
Hacking – product-led growth
The tech stack – early signals
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs)
Product analytics tools
A/B testing tools
Data warehouses
Business Intelligence (BI) tools
Growth-hacking tools
Managing costs and pricing – AI is expensive
Summary
References
Part 3 – Integrating AI into Existing Non-AI Products
11
The Rising Tide of AI
Evolve or die – when change is the only constant
The fourth industrial revolution – hospitals used to use candles
Working with a consultant
Working with a third party
The first hire
The first AI team
No-code tools
Fear is not the answer – there is more to gain than lose (or spend)
Anticipating potential risks
Summary
12
Trends and Insights across Industry
Highest growth areas – Forrester, Gartner, and McKinsey research
Embedded AI – applied and integrated use cases
Ethical AI – responsibility and privacy
Creative AI – generative and immersive applications
Autonomous AI development – TuringBots
Trends in AI adoption – let the data speak for itself
General trends
Embedded AI – applied and integrated use cases
Ethical AI – responsibility and privacy
Creative AI – generative and immersive applications
Autonomous AI development – TuringBots
Low-hanging fruit – quickest wins for AI enablement
Summary
References
13
Evolving Products into AI Products
Venn diagram – what’s possible and what’s probable
List 1 – value
List 2 – scope
List 3 – reach
Data is king – the bloodstream of the company
Preparation and research
Quality partnership
Benchmarking
The data team
Defining success
Competition – love your enemies
Product strategy – building a blueprint that works for everyone
Product strategy
Red flags and green flags – what to look for and watch out for
Red flags
Green flags
Summary
Additional resources
Index
Other Books You May Enjoy
Preface
It’s hard to come across anyone that doesn’t have strong opinions and reactions about AI these days. I’ve witnessed my own feelings and conclusions about it ebb and flow as the years have gone on. When I was a student, I felt a tremendous amount of excitement and optimism about where AI, and the fourth industrial revolution that accompanies it, would take us. That was quickly tempered when I started my book club, and I started a monthly practice of reading books about how bias and dependence on AI were compromising our lives in seen and unseen ways. Then, I started moderating events, where I brought together people from virtually every corner of AI and machine learning, who spoke not just on how they’re leveraging this technology in their own work but on their own beliefs about how AI will impact us in the future.
This brings us to one of the greatest debates we find ourselves returning to with every major advancement in technology. Do we dare adopt powerful technology even when we’re aware of the risks? As far as I see it, we don’t have a choice, and the debate is only an illusion we indulge ourselves in. AI is here to stay, and nihilistic fears about it won’t save us from any harm it may cause. Pandora’s box is open, and as we peer into what remains of it, we find that hope springs eternal.
AI is holding up a mirror to our biases and inequalities, and so far, it’s not a flattering reflection. It’s my hope that, with time, we will learn how to adopt AI responsibly in order to minimize its harm and optimize its greatest contributions to our modern civilization. I wanted to write a book about AI product management because it’s the makers of products that bring nebulous ideas into the real
world. Getting into the details about how to ideate, build, manage and maintain AI products with integrity, to the best of my ability, is the greatest contribution I can make to this field at this present moment. It’s been an honor to write this book.
Who this book is for
This book is for people that aspire to be AI product managers, AI technologists, and entrepreneurs, or for people that are casually interested in the considerations of bringing AI products to life. It should serve you if you’re already working in product management and you have a curiosity about building AI products. It should also serve you if you already work in AI development in some capacity and you’re looking to bring those concepts into the discipline of product management and adopt a more business-oriented role. While some chapters in the book are more technically focused, all of the technical content in the book can be considered beginner level and accessible to all.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding the Infrastructure and Tools for Building AI Products, offers an overview of the main concepts and areas of infrastructure for managing AI products.
Chapter 2, Model Development and Maintenance for AI Products, delves into the nuances of model development and maintenance.
Chapter 3, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Deep Dive, is a broader discussion of the difference between traditional deep learning and deep learning algorithms and their use cases.
Chapter 4, Commercializing AI Products, discusses the major areas of AI products we see in the market, as well as examples of the ethics and success factors that contribute to commercialization.
Chapter 5, AI Transformation and Its Impact on Product Management, explores the ways AI can be incorporated into the major market sectors in the future.
Chapter 6, Understanding the AI-Native Product, gives an overview of the strategies, processes, and team building needed to empower the success of an AI-native product.
Chapter 7, Productizing the ML Service, is an exploration of the trials and tribulations that may come up when building an AI product from scratch.
Chapter 8, Customization for Verticals, Customers, and Peer Groups, is a discussion on how AI products change and evolve over various types of verticals, customer types, and peer groups.
Chapter 9, Macro and Micro AI for Your Product, gives an overview of the various ways you can leverage AI in ways big and small, as well as some of the most successful examples and common mistakes.
Chapter 10, Benchmarking Performance, Growth Hacking, and Cost, explains the benchmarking needed to gauge product success at the product level rather than the model performance level.
Chapter 11, The Rising Tide of AI, is a revisit to the concept of the fourth industrial revolution and a blueprint for products that don’t currently leverage AI.
Chapter 12, Trends and Insights across Industry, dives into the various ways we’re seeing AI trending across industries, based on prominent and respected research organizations.
Chapter 13, Evolving Products into AI Products, is a practical guide on how to deliver AI features and upgrade the existing logic of products to successfully update products for AI commercial success.
Conventions used
The text conventions used throughout this book are as follows:
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
Share Your Thoughts
Once you’ve read The AI Product Manager’s Handbook, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.
Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we’re delivering excellent quality content.
Download a free PDF copy of this book
Thanks for purchasing this book!
Do you like to read on the go but are unable to carry your print books everywhere?
Is your eBook purchase not compatible with the device of your choice?
Don’t worry, now with every Packt book you get a DRM-free PDF version of that book at no cost.
Read anywhere, any place, on any device. Search, copy, and paste code from your favorite technical books directly into your application.
The perks don’t stop there, you can get exclusive access to discounts, newsletters, and great free content in your inbox daily
Follow these simple steps to get the benefits:
Scan the QR code or visit the link below
https://packt.link/free-ebook/9781804612934
Submit your proof of purchase
That’s it! We’ll send your free PDF and other benefits to your email directly
Part 1 – Lay of the Land – Terms, Infrastructure, Types of AI, and Products Done Well
An AI product manager needs to have a comprehensive understanding of AI, along with all the varied components that lead to its success, if they’re going to be successful in commercializing their products.
This first part consists of five cumulative chapters that will cover what the term AI encompasses and how to support infrastructure to make it successful within your organization. It will also cover how to support your AI program from a maintenance perspective, how to navigate the vast areas of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) and choose the best path for your product, and how to understand current and future developments in AI products.
By the end of this part, you will understand AI terms and components, what an AI implementation means from an investment perspective, how to maintain AI products sustainably, and how to choose between the types of AI that would best fit your product and market. You will also learn how to understand success factors for ideating and building a minimal viable product (MVP), and how to make a product that truly serves its market.
This part comprises the following chapters:
Chapter 1, Understanding the Infrastructure and Tools for Building AI Products
Chapter 2, Model Development and Maintenance for AI Products
Chapter 3, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Deep Dive
Chapter 4, Commercializing AI Products
Chapter 5, AI Transformation and Its Impact on Product Management
1
Understanding the Infrastructure and Tools for Building AI Products
Laying a solid foundation is an essential part of understanding anything, and the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) products seems a lot like our universe: ever-expanding. That rate of expansion is increasing with every passing year as we go deeper into a new way to conceptualize products, organizations, and the industries we’re all a part of. Virtually every aspect of our lives will be impacted in some way by AI and we hope those reading will come out of this experience more confident about what AI adoption will look like for the products they support or hope to build someday.
Part 1 of this book will serve as an overview of the lay of the land. We will cover terms, infrastructure, types of AI algorithms, and products done well, and by the end of this section, you will understand the various considerations when attempting to build an AI strategy, whether you’re looking to create a native-AI product or add AI features to an existing product.
Managing AI products is a highly iterative process, and the work of a product manager is to help your organization discover what the best combination of infrastructure, training, and deployment workflow is to maximize success in your target market. The performance and success of AI products lie in understanding the infrastructure needed for managing AI pipelines, the outputs of which will then be integrated into a product. In this chapter, we will cover everything from databases to workbenches to deployment strategies to tools you can use to manage your AI projects, as well as how to gauge your product’s efficacy.
This chapter will serve as a high-level overview of the subsequent chapters in Part 1 but it will foremost allow for a definition of terms, which are quite hard to come by in today’s marketing-heavy AI competitive landscape. These days, it feels like every product is an AI product, and marketing departments are trigger-happy with sprinkling that term around, rendering it almost useless as a descriptor. We suspect this won’t be changing anytime soon, but the more fluency consumers and customers alike have with the capabilities and specifics of AI, machine learning (ML), and data science, the more we should see clarity about how products are built and optimized. Understanding the context of AI is important for anyone considering building or supporting an AI product.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Definitions – what is and is not AI
ML versus DL – understanding the difference
Learning types in ML
The order – what is the optimal flow and where does every part of the process live?
DB 101 – databases, warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouses
Managing projects – IaaS
Deployment strategies – what do we do with these outputs?
Succeeding in AI – how well-managed AI companies do infrastructure right
The promise of AI – where is AI taking us?
Definitions – what is and is not AI
In 1950, a mathematician and world war II war hero Alan Turing asked a simple question in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence – Can machines think?. Today, we’re still grappling with that same question. Depending on who you ask, AI can be many things. Many maps exist out there on the internet, from expert systems used in healthcare and finance to facial recognition to natural language processing to regression models. As we continue with this chapter, we will cover many of the facets of AI that apply to products emerging in the market.
For the purposes of applied AI in products across industries, in this book, we will focus primarily on ML and deep learning (DL) models used in various capacities because these are often used in production anywhere AI is referenced in any marketing capacity. We will use AI/ML as a blanket term covering a span of ML applications and we will cover the major areas most people would consider ML, such as DL, computer vision, natural language processing, and facial recognition. These are the methods of applied AI that most people will come across in the industry, and familiarity with these applications will serve any product manager looking to break into AI. If anything, we’d like to help anyone who’s looking to expand into the field from another product management background to choose which area of AI appeals to them most.
We’d also like to cover what is and what isn’t ML. The best way for us to express it as simply as we can is: if a machine is learning from some past behavior and if its success rate is improving as a result of this learning, it is ML! Learning is the active element. No models are perfect but we do learn a lot from employing models. Every model will have some element of hyperparameter tuning, and the use of each model will yield certain results in performance. Data scientists and ML engineers working with these models will be able to benchmark performance and see how performance is improving. If there are fixed, hardcoded rules that don’t change, it’s not ML.
AI is a subset of computer science, and all programmers are effectively doing just that: giving computers a set of instructions to fire away on. If your current program doesn’t learn from the past in any way, if it simply executes on directives it was hardcoded with, we can’t call this ML. You may have heard the terms rules-based engine or expert system thrown around in other programs. They are considered forms of AI, but they're not ML because although they are a form of AI, the rules are effectively replicating the work of a person, and the system itself is not learning or changing on its own.
We find ourselves in a tricky time in AI adoption where it can be very difficult to find information online about what makes a product AI. Marketing is eager to add the AI label to their products but there still isn’t a baseline of explainability with what that means out in the market. This further confuses the term AI for consumers and technologists alike. If you’re confused by the terms, particularly when they’re applied to products you see promoted online, you’re very much not alone.
Another area of confusion is the general term that is AI. For most people, the concept of AI brings to mind the Terminator franchise from the 1980s and other futurist depictions of inescapable technological destruction. While there certainly can be a lot of harm to come from AI, this depiction represents what’s referred to as strong AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI). We still have ways to go for something such as AGI but we’ve got plenty of what’s referred to as artificial narrow intelligence or narrow AI (ANI).
ANI is also commonly expressed as weak AI and is what’s generally meant when you see AI plastered all over products you find online. ANI is exactly what it sounds like: a narrow application of AI. Maybe it’s good at talking to you, at predicting some future value, or at organizing things; maybe it’s an expert at that, but its expertise won’t bleed into other areas. If it could, it would stop being ANI. These major areas of AI are referred to as strong and weak in comparison to human intelligence. Even the most convincing conversational AIs out there, and they are quite convincing, are demonstrating an illusionary intelligence. Effectively, all AI that exists at the moment is weak or ANI. Our Terminator days are still firmly in our future, perhaps never to be realized.
For every person out there that’s come across Reddit threads about AI being sentient or somehow having ill will toward us, we want to make the following statement very clear. AGI does not exist and there is no such thing as sentient AI. This does not mean AI doesn’t actively and routinely cause humans harm, even in its current form. The major caveat here is that unethical, haphazard applications of AI already actively cause us both minor inconveniences and major upsets. Building AI ethically and responsibly is still a work in progress. While AI systems may not be sentiently plotting the downfall of humanity, when they’re left untested, improperly managed, and inadequately vetted for bias, the applications of ANI that are deployed already have the capacity to do real damage in our lives.
For now, can machines think like us? No, they don’t think like us. Will they someday? We hope not. It’s my personal opinion that the insufferable aspects of the human condition end with us. But we do very much believe that we will experience some of our greatest ails, as well as our wildest curiosities, to be impacted considerably by the benevolence of AI and ML.
ML versus DL – understanding the difference
As a product manager, you’re going to need to build a lot of trust with your technical counterparts so that, together, you can build an amazing product that works as well as it can technically. If you’re reading this book, you’ve likely come across the phrase ML and DL. We will use the following sections titled ML and DL to go over some of the basics but keep in mind that we will be elaborating on these concepts further down in Chapter 3.
ML
In its basic form, ML is made up of two essential components: the models used and the training data it’s learning from. These data are historical data points that effectively teach machines a baseline foundation from which to learn, and every time you retrain the models, the models are theoretically improving. How the models are chosen, built, tuned, and maintained for optimized performance is the work of data scientists and ML engineers. Using this knowledge of performance toward the optimization of the product experience itself is the work of product managers. If you’re working in the field of AI product management, you’re working incredibly closely with your data science and ML teams.
We’d like to also make a distinction about the folks you’ll be working with as an AI product manager. Depending on your organization, you’re either working with data scientists and developers to deploy ML or you’re working with ML engineers who can both train and upkeep the models as well as deploy them into production. We highly suggest maintaining strong relationships with any and all of these impacted teams, along with DevOps.
All ML models can be grouped into the following four major learning categories:
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Semi-supervised learning
Reinforcement learning
These are the four major areas of ML and each area is going to have its particular models and algorithms that are used in each specialization. The learning type has to do with whether or not you’re labeling the data and the method you’re using to reward the models you’ve used for good performance. These learning types are relevant whether your product is using a DL model or not, so they’re inclusive of all ML models. We will be covering the learning types in more depth in the following section titled Learning types in ML.
DL
DL is a subset of ML, but the terms are often used colloquially as almost separate expressions. The reason for this is DL is based on neural network algorithms and ML can be thought of as… the rest of the algorithms. In the preceding section covering ML, we looked at the process of taking data, using it to train our models, and using that trained model to predict new future data points. Every time you use the model, you see how off it was from the correct answer by getting some understanding of the rate of error so you can iterate back and forth until you have a model that works well enough. Every time, you are creating a model based on data that has certain patterns or features.
This process is the same in DL, but one of the key differences of DL is that patterns or features in your data are largely picked up by the DL algorithm through what’s referred to as feature learning or feature engineering through a hierarchical layered system. We will go into the various algorithms that are used in the following section because there are a few nuances between each, but as you continue developing your understanding of the types of ML out there, you’ll also start to group the various models that make up these major areas of AI (ML and DL). For marketing purposes, you will for the most part see terms such as ML, DL/neural networks, or just the general umbrella term of AI referenced where DL algorithms are used.
It’s important to know the difference between what these terms mean in practice and at the model level and how they’re communicated by non-technical stakeholders. As product managers, we are toeing the line between the two worlds: what engineering is building and what marketing is communicating. Anytime you’ve heard the term black box model, it’s referring to