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Selling Workers on the Importance of AI; Fund Seeks $100 Million; The Man Who Has to Save Softbank's Vision Fund
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The way to overcome the challenge, according to PwC, is to create three tiers of AI-ready workers and get them to work together successfully. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
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Selling rank-and-file workers on importance of AI. One of the biggest hurdles to successfully completing artificial-intelligence projects is at the level of business units, where rank-and-file employees often lack the know-how for implementing and managing AI, technology experts tell WSJ Pro AI.
AI isn't just about technology—it’s about the business application of that technology, said Mohamed Kande, a vice chairman and head of the global advisory service at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “[T]he big gap that we are seeing out there...is around the people-side of the equation—the workforce. Technology has to be adopted by people,” he said.
In its client work, PwC often sees businesses look only at the implementation of the technology, ignoring the use case and the readiness of the people who are supposed to work with it.
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The way to overcome the challenge, according to PwC, is to create three tiers of AI-ready workers and get them to work together successfully:
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Users. As the technology spreads through a business, these are employees who learn how to use AI-enhanced applications, support good data governance and get expert help when needed
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“Citizen” developers. These staffers, about 5% to 10% of the workforce, should be further trained to become power users who can identify use cases and data sets, and who can work closely with a firm’s AI specialists to develop AI applications.
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Data scientists. They create, deploy and manage AI applications
Making the right moves. PwC recommends steps such as including AI in employee training courses, identifying new skills and new roles as AI is deployed, changing performance reviews to include AI skills, and expanding the talent pipeline with internships and college and university partnerships.
“I think the key for digital transformation to scale successfully in large organizations is to engage more than just the data scientist—getting others working with the data, creating models, deploying models,” said Oliver Schabenberger, executive vice president, chief operating officer and chief technology officer of analytics-software maker SAS Institute Inc. “If I can learn woodworking late in life, why can't I learn to build AI models?”
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Neville Teagarden, managing partner of AI Capital, said the firm targets growth-stage startups that already have corporate customers. PHOTO: AI CAPITAL
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AI fund raising $100 million. AI Capital, a new venture-capital firm targeting artificial intelligence-based enterprise software startups, is raising a $100 million second fund which it expects to close next year, Marc Vartabedian reports for WSJ Pro.
The Boulder, Colo.-based firm has been investing out of a $10 million pilot fund launched in 2017, Managing Partner Neville Teagarden said.
The firm has just led its first venture financing, a $7 million round made out of its pilot fund into startup Link3D Inc. The company builds business software that is meant to streamline equipment manufacturers’ production and supply-chain management.
The startup’s software incorporates artificial intelligence to automate business processes such as work orders, price quotes, product scheduling and data analytics. The software can be used in industries including aerospace, defense, automotive, consumer, medical, and oil and gas.
In the automotive industry, for instance, Link3D’s software can help manufacturers scale industrial 3-D printing supply chains, leading to cost reductions.
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Vision Fund head Rajeev Misra in Sun Valley, Idaho, last year. DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
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Rajeev Misra must save Softbank’s massive Vision Fund. Rajeev Misra built SoftBank’s huge Vision Fund into a powerhouse in the tech world. Now that key investments in companies such as Uber and WeWork have fallen in value, he must save the situation, the Journal’s Liz Hoffman and Bradley Hope report.
Known for his eccentricities. “A finance whiz who cut his teeth on Wall Street, he pads around the Vision Fund’s London headquarters barefoot, often chewing on betel nuts, a mild stimulant. He recently changed the layout of his office after consulting his astrologer,” the Journal writes.
He was at Deutsche Bank during the runup to the financial crisis, where he oversaw a team of credit traders whose bet against the U.S. subprime mortgage market was chronicled in “The Big Short." His banking relationship with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son goes back to 2006.
The massive but highly leveraged Vision Fund known for big bets on tech “unicorns” with billion-dollar-plus valuations is taking a more cautious approach. “The Vision Fund no longer will make giant bets on single companies, and Mr. Misra has promised investors the next fund will be spent over five years, rather than the two it took to run through the first,” the Journal says. “Executives will be held more accountable for the deals they champion.”
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People watch the Intel Extreme Masters 2018 World Championships esports match of StarCraft II in Katowice, Poland, March 4, 2018. PHOTO: AGENCJA GAZETA/REUTERS
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DeepMind masters yet another game. DeepMind, the Alphabet Inc.-owned lab known for beating human performance in games such as chess and Go, has conquered a new domain. This time, DeepMind’s AlphaStar software achieved grandmaster status playing StarCraft II, the real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment, the Verge reported.
DeepMind’s AI is able to beat 99.8% of all human players at a game that DeepMind regards as more complex than chess or Go, according to the Verge.
Not just a game. DeepMind regards the breakthrough as evidence that reinforcement learning, the machine learning technique used to train AlphaStar, “may one day be used to train self-learning robots, self-driving cars, and create more advanced image and object recognition systems,” the Verge reports.
Reinforcement learning can be combined with massive computing power and virtual simulation. “Agents can clock hundreds of years of play time in the span of a few months," the Verge said.
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Hear This: NASA robot with mics will roam International Space Station. NASA has partnered with Bosch to send an acoustic monitoring system called SoundSee up to the space station on November 2 during a Northrop Grumman mission, MIT Technology Review reports.
The system includes an array of microphones capable of listening in at frequencies ranging from less than 100 hertz up to 80 kilohertz, according to the Technology Review. The range of human hearing is between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, it says. Data collected by the system is analyzed using a number of tools including deep-learning AI.
“The system will be attached to an autonomous Astrobee robot that flies around the station and assists astronauts in their tasks throughout the day,” the Review says. “The hope is that it will map the acoustic environment of the entire station and be able to alert astronauts to any unusual sounds.”
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Startup raises £3.3 million for audio tools. Accusonus, a Greece and U.S.-based AI company that aims to help content creators improve the audio in their videos, collected $3.3 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch writes. Athens-based Venture Friends, led the round, with participation from Big Pi, IQBility, PJ Tech, along with a syndicate of U.S.-based investors led by the CEO of Accusonus. Launched in 2014, Accusonus's first product was a tool that lets recording engineers control microphone leakage in drum recordings. More recently it has developed simple-to-use tools aimed at video content and podcast producers.
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