Let's say you're somewhere in the field of AI. You are somewhere from AI researcher (only uses their keyboard to check their mail, every 1 minute) to AI developer (fingers rarely leave keyboard).
You know what AI is. AI is simply the automation of things, under various circumstances. There are certain laborious, dangerous, prohibitively difficult tasks, so we make software or machines to do them.
If you utter "Artificial Intelligence" to a non-technical person, a completely different image appears in their mind. It's something a bit more like this:
or worse, this:
I've actually had people ask me if machines will one day "love".
The non-technical person has a completely different image of what constitutes AI than you do. The consequence of this for the entrepreneur is, if you tell someone "My software is revolutionary because it uses Artificial Intelligence!!", they will undoubtedly become excited, and then become utterly disappointed when you actually show them your software.
No where have I learned this lesson more bluntly than when I was pitching my startup to a venture capitalist.
Brief story. This was back when our software was something completely different, and we were pitching it as basically an intelligent task management system. We walked into the meeting, and by this point, all the investor knew was it involved artificial intelligence, and he was very excited. As we were giving the presentation, you could slowly see the man deflate. When it finally came time to give our demo. He watched the system assign unfinished tasks to time slots, and exclaimed "it's just putting tasks where ever there's free time." I tried to explain that no, the system is actually sorting through many constraints, and figuring out what the possible orderings there are for tasks given the goals that have to be accomplished, but he was having none of it. "This isn't...artificial" he said in disappointment.
AI is about solving problems that are too difficult to do by hand. It enables you to solve extreme, prohibitively difficult problems. For example, finding content on the internet relative to your query involves looking at TRILLIONS of pages and examining them. One person could not do it in his lifetime, so Google uses AI to do it for you. But you'll notice Google does not ever say "We use AI! Come use our search engine!" They just solved a problem no one else could nearly as well, and let this fact speak for itself.
A similiar sentiment has been expressed recently by the infamous Ted Dziuba, one of the creators of Pressflip (formerly Persai), a new content recommendation site:
How Does it Work?
That's a good question. After dealing with angel investors, VCs, users, and anybody who isn't an engineer, the answer in my mind is, nobody gives a shit. Really, nobody cares about your algorithm or how revolutionary you think it is. All people care about is a system that shows them things they want to read.
I'm here to tell you, man, that is right on.
Your software is not revolutionary because it uses Artificial Intelligence. Your software is revolutionary because it is able to solve a problem that was until this moment not solved. *That* is what you must pitch.
