How can I move to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

In the last 6 months, 10+ professionals at different stages of their professional career have asked me the same question, “How can I switch to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning field?”

And to all, my question was “Why do you want to switch, isn’t your job good.”

Barring a few, the response was “Yes, it is. But AI is in fashion.”

With quotes like “Data being the new oil”,” Data Scientist being the sexiest job of century”, professionals wants to switch to Machine Learning and Artificial Field. And we have free courses available online too to train the people.

Its your personal decision if you want to switch. But switching since something is in fashion does not seem intelligent to me. I mean there are tons of jobs still available in c#, Java, SQL, c++, .NET, ETL, DW. And just because some technology is in fashion, is not a complete reason to move to it.

Before you take a decision to move to AI/ML, get to know the big differences in expectation and reality.

Expectation: you will be writing cutting-edge, state-of-the-art algorithms.

Reality: Getting data is biggest hurdle. You will be following up with DW team to give you data. It will take you ages to get data. And then you will be cleaning it and cleaning it. 

Expectation: you will help organization by enabling a data-driven culture.

Reality: People don’t want to be driven, forget data or no-data. You might be even viewed as someone who is unnecessarily messing up things.

Expectation: you will generate insights from the data.

Reality: with a laptop with 2 GB RAM, nothing is going to work. Your Excel, R, Python will hang.

Expectation: You will be making a huge impact on business by drawing insights from data. 

Reality: First you will not get data. And don’t expect that your insights are always right and are always welcome too. Nobody can change their tried and tested business strategy on-the-fly just because a statistical algorithm says so. And they should not too.

But at the same time there are huge positives in field. 

You get to see the bigger picture of business and of various departments. 

The flow of goods, the customer angle and their behavior, inter-connected patterns, competition landscape, seasonality and many more will broaden your horizon. 

Your insights will be listened and some might be implemented too. 

You will be discussing with senior stakeholders and learning from their experiences. 

Yes, the learning is quite good. 

The choice is your’s. Enter if you want to enter, not because it’s in “fashion”.