For those companies wondering not how important AI will be (too late now) but how best to organise in order to maximise the benefit, this is a book* for us. It’s written for business leaders whose job is (of course) to decide who or what decides. It answers the most obvious questions of how (and why) an organisation would and could delegate decisions to AI and explores the consequences of doing so. More than the two previous books on the subject I have tried to read, it makes sense of the trade-offs between the decisions of AI and of humans. It does this with a host of compelling, mini case studies showing how AI can create opportunities that were unimaginable before we all started talking about it.
But there’s more.
I must declare an interest because the author of this well-explained, digestible (and mere 150-page tome) is Tim Trumper. He’s a publisher-turned-data-specialist with whom I previously collaborated on some of Australia’s largest magazines and web sites. That may be why I can see the publisher’s deft hand in his easy-to-read, jargon-free chapters on how companies might be best organised to make the most of AI – all with concise summaries. Today, the author is chair of Australia’s NRMA (cf the Automobile Association) and also adviser to Quantium, the 22-year-old Sydney-based company that is now a world-leader in data science and AI.
Trumper concludes that most organisations (let alone media) are likely to have a unique proprietary data set that can be strategically enhanced to create invaluable insights and predictive capability. But there are plenty more calls to action.
I strongly recommend this book not as a biblical work without which your company can’t navigate these dangerously exciting technologies but as a primer to immerse executives in the subject. It will appetise or tantalise even the most tech-tied people. Way to start.
*”AI: Game On”, by Tim Trumper. Published by Hardie Grant Books (Melbourne, Australia). 2024.
