You need to go from your house to the Airport. Do you take a Limo or a bike? Of course a Limo? The road is bad and the traffic worse… A Limo is not always the right choice.

Product Managers solve user problems. Sometimes AI is the answer to all your problems. Other times, it is not worth the trouble.

The question becomes, when and where should we leverage AI in our Products?

My first job as a Product Manager was in an AI based startup whose core competency was image and video based analytics. I was exploring the feasibility and applications in the Security Surveillance space.

What I found surprised me.

One of my visits was to a company helping the Singapore govt with the Surveillance of the country. Singapore has one of the finest infrastructures of the world. And it maintains it beautifully. Littering is a punishable offence. One aspect, hence also becomes ensuring that people don’t throw garbage from the balconies of their highrise buildings.

The few rooms had its walls completely plastered with hundreds of screens. Around 1 person per wall was busily looking at multiple screens at a time trying to detect violations. 24X7 monitoring across thousands of cameras was not an easy task.Was it practical? I would say no, not if done manually.

So here is how they handled it.

They added pixel monitors on each of the balcony railings within range. Any pixel changes flagged the image and people would set forth to manually analyze them.

There were two main problems. First, this was, of course, not scalable. Second, There were too many false positives. Anyone randomly roaming around in their balcony would trigger the alarm. Needless to say, this was very expensive to implement. That was when I was convinced that an AI could do this better and more effectively.

Just like this use case, there are many problems that could be solved by AI.

But what are those problems? When do you even dabble with AI to solve your problems.

It is worth a serious consideration because AI is not without its limitations and challenges. AI done wrong often leads to extremely high costs without the added value. Un-Explainability of results and inconsistent responses are other factors often hampering the reliability.

So, what are some guidelines that will help you decide if to go the AI route.

Do not use AI if:

• Your problems can be solved by simple rules
• If you need an explanation of why you received the output that you did. AI is often unexplainable.
• You need a 100% accuracy 100% times
• If you do not have good quality and quantity of data
• If your product includes one or more of the following problems, you could leverage AI

1. Ranking and recommendation

When you visit Amazon app with an intention to buy a product, it is important to Amazon that you make a purchase. With thousands of Products in a single category, how does Amazon shows you the product that you will like? It hence utilizes your behavioral patterns, the characteristic of products, and other parameter to predict the products you are likely to purchase. It can do so without AI as well, but then keeping a track of your changing preferences, purchasing patterns need constant adaptation. AI hence solves this problem beautifully.

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