At Element Data, we eat and breathe Decision Intelligence, so we were excited to hear Cassie Kozyrkov, chief decision scientist at Google Cloud discuss this emerging practice on the Google Cloud Platform Podcast recently.
We were especially intrigued when she brought up Elvis…yes, Elvis.
So, what does The King have to do with Decision Intelligence? Well, the connection has a lot to do with the human intuition at the core of our Decision Intelligence-based platform, Decision Cloud. It’s important to take into consideration intuition and bias in decision making, but we humans shouldn’t place as much emphasis on it as we often do. With AI and machine-learning-based decision support from technologies like our Decision Cloud platform, we vastly improve on decisions made with faulty human intuition alone.
OK, so here’s where Elvis comes in. As Kozyrkoz explained it, “We humans are really good at finding patterns; we’ll find Elvis in a piece of toast, and we shouldn’t take that seriously.” She continued, “We’re allowed to make decisions based on intuition as long as we’re really honest with ourselves about it, but if that’s a really important decision, then the decision maker might not want to run headlong into the wall based on Elvis found in a slice of toast.”
She went on to suggest that, because we have access to such a wealth of data today, businesses and organizations making important decisions have the ability to “split” their data sets, employing a separate data set for exploratory research and another for the more rigorous machine learning-based phase of decision-making. Kozyrkoz described why taking these separate approaches makes sense:
“They want to make sure that this is something worth taking seriously. They want to approach the decision rigorously. Well, then they can use that inspiration to frame their decision context and that’s really easy to do ‘cause they know what they were doing before the insight came in; they know what they thought about before changing their minds in response to the data…. Then they can go to the other data set and have their experts check that it’s actually worth taking that action, that we should take it seriously, and statistics really is the science of changing your mind. So you’ll bring the statistician in and see if it’s worth actually reacting to that piece of insight. So split your data.”
It’s exciting to learn about how practitioners and companies molding this burgeoning Decision Intelligence space – from a startup like Element Data to an influential global powerhouse like Google – are thinking about its core principles, building technology and applying it for better decision making. It’s clear that Decision Intelligence, though still a relatively nascent sector, promises to transform human decision making for enterprises, organizations and consumers alike. We believe Decision Cloud will help us get there.
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