Artificial intelligence is everywhere. This book goes beyond merely a definition of artificial intelligence, delving into a discussion of strategies, tools, vendors, and trends to ensure, as a consultant and/or business leader, you are competitive in 2019 and beyond. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations for Business Leaders & Consultants illustrates how to successfully embed artificial intelligence in yours or your client's organization through a simple view of a complex topic to enabling listeners to leverage AI for competitive advantage. The goal of AI shouldn't be to replace human interaction but to improve human interaction and take human capabilities to the next level. The best way organizations can equip themselves for the accelerating onslaught of AI and machine learning systems is to learn to partner with them. And that's what Artificial Intelligence: Foundations for Business Leaders & Consultants teaches.

As an executive in a top 10 North American financial institution, I witnessed the evolution of artificial intelligence within a large corporate environment. In our case, we were addressing the ever-increasing challenge of cybercrime through the analysis of big data, machine learning, and fraud identification techniques. Each of these is a component of the artificial intelligence world. From the first approaches to artificial intelligence by Alan Turing and contemporaries in the 1950s, through a series of so-called "AI winters", to today's world of robotics, availability of data, efficient algorithms, adequate computing power, and availability of funding, company leaders have watched the evolution; today businesses of all sizes can take advantage of artificial intelligence. The challenge today for organizations is not simply awareness of technology changes including AI; it's that the pace of the change is accelerating exponentially. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations for Business Leaders & Consultants will direct your efforts in a way that allows you and your organization to keep pace. Whether the dominant issue in your organization is expensive operations, ineffective use of resources, challenging data analysis, a less than satisfactory customer experience or some other issue, artificial intelligence tools exist today to assist. The future holds even greater opportunities for AI; opportunities to support human interaction, and of course consultant, business leader, and organizational success.