Driving AI ROI
How do you ensure you drive ROI from AI? You give the keys to the right all-in-one person.
Here’s the experience, skills, capabilities, judgement, and discernment this generational talent must possess, in compounding layers, from bottom to top:
- Mathematics: must possess a deep understanding of mathematics and be classically trained in it, from a young age. It should include calculus, geometry, probabilities, linear algebra, risk assessment, and actuarial tests passed.
- Engineering: must understand software engineering natively and have written code and built internet products from scratch that are efficient, high-performance, and solved a useful need at fractal scale, from the birth of the Internet.
- AI/ML: must have built more than 30 AI/ML products and algorithms, including foundational models with different architectures than LLMs, for applications including multi-modal, autonomous systems (software and robotics), recommendations, language and visual understanding, and have pushed the state of the art forward in some meaningful way.
- Product: must have intuitive product sense, proving themselves along the full continuum from invention, prototyping, productization, commercialization, and growth serving both consumers and the enterprise at small, mid, and planetary scales. It should include awarded and pending patent history.
- Finance / Economics: must be classically trained in the fundamentals of finance and economics, including advanced degrees, and have applied those to economies on the internet in the form of products.
- Advisory: must have scaled advisory experience working with the Boards and management teams of the Fortune 1000 all the way up to the Fortune 1 on incentive design, metrics and goal setting, to drive growth in key metrics such as Total Shareholder Return, Revenue, Return, and Profitability.
- Operations: must have operating experience at all size levels, management levels, across all departments and all industries.
- Investing: must have produced at least 100x returns in public market investing over longer than a decade.
The reason you’re not getting the returns you want is because you’re trying to Committee this emerging tech experience across hundreds or thousands of people and organizations, none of whom have all of this talent or experience in a single individual. As a result, you’re spending hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions of dollars wasting time, money, and energy on group think that doesn’t get the job done.
In short, you’re listening to the grade school team chasing that soccer ball all around the field instead of the 10-time olympic gold medal winner.
This person exists.
I challenge you to find him.
—Sean