Book Review "Your AI Survival Guide"
by Sol Rashidi about scrape knees, bruised ellbows and lessons learned from real-world ai deployments
What to expect?
AI is clearly a hype topic and I think Sol Rashidi was riding the wave with this book. My expectation was to learn - possibly with some good stories - about how it is to build AI in a company as CDO/CAIO. My experience was very mixed…
The Person
If you don’t now anything about Sol Rashidi and her career (unlikely, if you have ever heard of her), you will learn about before the table of content, in the first chapter and again in chapter 2 you have the full story. Maybe it's just because European or especially German authors wouldn’t typically present themselves so directly and in such detail that I’m a little bit surprised. Somehow she builds a legend around her person and that’s also what I see on social media.
When I first recognized her, I have seen an interview and bought the book, because I was somehow impressed on my own.
The Book
Every book has it’s target group. This is very important. And to understand the following you have to know, contrary to my original expectations, i am not or just partly this target group.
This book is best for people interested and new to AI, but now suddenly somehow involved or even in responsiblity for AI. As AI today is a topic becoming more and more relevant for every business department, yes it is possibly helpful for many people.
If you have already experience a little bit in Data, Analytics and AI and somehow already involved in managing projects, I would recommend to buy more specific books.
The Value
Indeed after long lists of who is this book for or not and what is the benefit, after a deep dive on the career of Sol Rashidi, we already come to chapter 3 and chapter 4, the best parts of the book, from my perspective. After a short but good introduction on how to find your strategy in chapter 4 - “How to Start” where she walks you through six phases on how to start your end-to-end AI intiative:
Conducting a Readiness Assessment
Your AI Strategy
Creating and Selecting Use Cases (see also here)
Preparing and Designing
Selecting a Solution
Deploying and Going Live
I liked these chapters as they include some tools and frameworks. Some real thing you can think about and work with. It is written in a practical way. Even if I had expected more experience from the real business life depending on the book titel and the backround of Sol Rashidi, I think it can be a good and helpful part to give some orientation.
The Hard Part (for me)
I have seen several books starting well, but from the middle it eases off a little. I had this experience with “Elements of Data Strategy” for example. Here it is a little bit different. The thing is, what came next was very very flat.
Chapter 5 - Your Project Killers: The Wrong People - Some basics you learn in the most project management or change management 101 trainings. Not wrong but a missed chance to share real experinces to add value.
Chapter 6 - Human in the Loop - Super important. Well written, nice own experience, nothing valuable from the business. Many examples for sure but nothing what really helps in daily life managing AI and mostly it could be written from everyone. Bring in her own experience here is nice but also missing business context.
Chapter 7 - How AI Will Impact Every Industry and Function - Endless short descriptions trying to capture every industry and LoB with mostly 3 very general, very briefly described examples everyone could put together.
Chapter 8 - AI Jargon and Development - Entertaining, indeed. 20 pages of terms and history, nicely written but again, nothing special, no experience. The value indeed is to explain things simple to the world.
For every chapter here, there is for sure a little bit context, so that some value is created. But it feels a little bit like a long appendix for what else could be important, written by someone else.
Chapter 9 - What the Future Holds - seems to be a bit more personal and I think especially the “What’s Next” part, with the essential checklist is something helpful and the feeling of participating from the experience of an AI leader comes back a little bit.
Conclusion
I see a lot of very positiv reviews and around 4.7 stars on Amazon.com for this book. As you have probably noticed I wouldn’t give 5 or 4 stars for the book even if some parts are interesting and well prepared. As I said, I’m possibly the wrong target group. I had loved to hear from her - how it is described - extensive experience but just got a lot of basics.
The value of Sol Rashidi’s book lies in explaining complex things simple for people not familiar with the topic, what should not be underestimated.
If you look rather for tools and methodology, I would rather recommend “Elements of Data Strategy” by Boyan Angelov.
If you look for examples for making use of data I would rather recommend “Data Juice: 101 Stories of How Organizations Are Squeezing Value from Available Data Assets“ by Doug Laney - still flat but comparable deeper and broader.
If you care about people, communication and change, maybe you find a good start in Tiankai Fengs “Humanizing Data Strategy“
In every case if you are responsible somehow for AI in your business department or your company I strongly recommend delving much deeper, even if all these books listet here can be a good start.
What is your experience with the book?