12/18/2020 What Is a Minimum Viable AI Product?
What Is a Minimum
Viable AI Product?
To be successful, an AI pilot needs to go beyond the basic
requirements of standard IT projects.
Thomas H. Davenport and Rudina Seseri • December 15, 2020 READING TIME: 9 MIN
One of the key attributes of the lean startup approach
popularized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries is the
development and re nement of a minimum viable
product (MVP) that engages customer and investor
attention without large product development
expenditures. Initially de ned by technologist Frank
Robinson, an MVP may not meet all customer needs,
but itYou
o ers
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customers to get started. It’s a paradigm that has
become well established in technology product
development.
But what does the concept of an MVP mean for
arti cial intelligence? This is a question that is
relevant not only to startups but also to large
enterprises. Many companies are developing AI pilots
in di erent areas of their business that they hope will
demonstrate the potential value of AI and eventually
lead to production deployment. An MVP for a large
organization has many similarities to a pilot or proof
of concept.
For any organization pursuing AI, then, it’s important
to understand what constitutes a successful MVP. It’s
equally important to a venture capital rm that invests
primarily in AI companies — like Glasswing Ventures,
with which we are both involved — to understand AI
MVPs and what it takes to improve them. Based on
several Glasswing portfolio companies and others
we’ve researched, we’d argue that while some of the
necessary attributes are true of IT products in general
— that it’s useful even in its earliest stages, that
customers’ early use can be monitored in order to
improve the product, and that it can be developed
relatively quickly and cheaply — early AI products
have some unique requirements in terms of what
quali es them for MVP status.
Data and the MVP
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Machine learning is a common underlying technology
for AI, and it improves via copious amounts of data.
Supervised learning, by far the most common type in
business, requires data with labeled outcomes.
Therefore, data is perhaps the single most critical
resource for an AI product, and it is necessary even at
the MVP stage. With no data, there is no trained
machine learning algorithm.
Anyone attempting to create an AI MVP should be
able to answer the following types of questions — and
investors or enterprise sponsors should be asking
them:
• What data assets do your primary models rely on
for training?
• Do you already have su cient data to train a
somewhat e ective model? (More later on why
“somewhat e ective” may be ample.)
• How proprietary is the data used to train your
models?
• How much data integration, cleaning, and other
activities remain to be performed on your data before
it is useful for training?
• Do you envision that additional data will become
available to improve your models at some point?
Machine learning algorithms or models themselves
are becoming somewhat commoditized. One provider
of automated machine learning software, DataRobot,
advertises that it has created over a billion models
(though not all of them are being used, of course). But
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data remains a more challenging resource; it can
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require an enormous amount of e ort to clean,
integrate, and transform it into usable formats. And if
the data source used by an early minimally viable AI
product is broadly available — for example, the
ImageNet database of labeled images — it is unlikely
to provide much competitive advantage.
An example of valuable proprietary data is the
information used by Armored Things, a startup in the
Glasswing portfolio. Armored Things’ customers are
major event venues and campuses looking to improve
their physical security as well as their facilities and
operations management. The company’s AI combines
data from existing video, Wi-Fi, smart door locks, and
other sensors into a “spatial intelligence layer” in
building a real-time crowd intelligence platform. This
unique data set is vital in enabling visibility over how
people use and move through physical spaces and
helped push this young company’s o ering into MVP
status.
The Los Angeles Football Club professional soccer
team is using Armored Things to gain a real-time
understanding of fan ow and to make smarter
decisions about crowd density, sanitation, and
security for the club’s 22,000-seat venue, one of the
most high-tech settings for professional sports. Such
technology is crucial as fans begin returning to
sporting events after the disruption caused by COVID-
19. Fast data analysis and action are integral to
building trust and optimizing a safe fan experience.
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Intelligence Beyond Data
and an Algorithm
Machine learning alone — and deep learning in
particular — is often not enough to create e ective AI,
even when coupled with clean, proprietary data.
Machine learning solutions to problems involving
perceptual tasks (speech, vision), control (robotics),
and prediction (customer demand planning) vary
greatly in tractability and complexity.
Early AI products may need to focus on the following
four areas in order to achieve minimum viability.
1. AI MVPs may require complex hybrid models.
Challenges such as modeling human dialogue, which
can be a sparse-data problem because of the limited
amount of information available, are unlikely to be
solved using brute-force approaches. In such cases, it
may be more practical, when reaching for an MVP, to
contemplate using hybrid solutions that combine
deep learning with a priori knowledge modeling and
rules-based logical reasoning. These AI solutions are
less complex and require less data than deep learning,
and they supply greater transparency. Such hybrid
algorithms are rarely available o the shelf, so it’s
important that founders consider the implications of
the associated exploratory research they require.
For instance, Cogito uses arti cial intelligence to
improve call center conversations by interpreting
about 200 verbal and nonverbal behavioral cues in
agents’
Youconversations.
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intensity, consistency, pitch, tone, pace, tension, and
e ort. The tool sends real-time signals to human
workers to guide them to speak more con dently and
empathetically so they can do their jobs at a higher
level. As Cogito CEO Joshua Feast has said, the
software “helps people be more charming in
conversation,” which translates into higher Net
Promoter Scores (28% higher, according to one
study), shorter average call times, and fewer
instances where customers escalate a call to a
manager. The hybrid of natural language processing
through machine learning, combined with the
detection of social signals, creates substantially
better recommendations than either technology
alone.
2. AI MVP pilots need to show integration potential.
Most organizations don’t want to use a separate AI
application, so a new solution should allow easy
integration with existing systems of record, typically
through an application programming interface. This
allows AI solutions to plug into existing data records
and combine with transactional systems, reducing the
need for behavior change.
Zylotech, another Glasswing company, applies this
principle to its self-learning B2B customer data
platform. The company integrates client data across
existing platforms; enriches it with a proprietary data
set about what clients have browsed and bought
elsewhere; and provides intelligent insights and
recommendations about next best actions for clients’
marketing, sales,
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designed speci cally to directly complement clients’
existing software suites, minimizing adoption friction.
Another integration example is Verusen, an inventory
optimization platform also in the Glasswing portfolio.
Given the existence of large, entrenched enterprise
resource planning players in the market, it was
essential for the platform to integrate with such
systems. It gathers existing inventory data and
provides its AI-generated recommendations on how
to connect disparate data and forecast future
inventory needs without requiring signi cant user
behavior change.
3. AI MVPs must exhibit evidence of domain
knowledge. This relates to showing integration
potential: Understanding how a solution will t into
existing vertical ecosystems and work ows is
absolutely critical. For example, there are many cases
in which otherwise good health care AI applications
(such as diagnostic assistants) end up gathering dust
on a shelf because they simply do not assimilate well
into a doctor’s routine.
An MVP needs to solve a particular business or
consumer problem, so it is important for the team to
have domain knowledge of that problem. ClimaCell, a
weather intelligence center, is a prime example of
such a platform. ClimaCell’s team has drawn
information from satellites, wireless signals, airplanes,
street cameras, connected cars, drones, and other
electronic sources to deliver street-by-street, minute-
by-minute weather forecasts up to six hours in
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days out). Its on-demand “micro weather forecasts”
have helped organizations like Uber, Ford, National
Grid, and the New England Patriots football team
improve their own readiness and provide better
details and service to customers.
4. AI MVPs need to provide Day Zero value. AI
applications often improve over time with additional
data. However, when developing an AI MVP, it’s
important to think about that rst customer and how
to deliver value from Day Zero.
This may require focusing initially on cleaning
customer data to build a data set that can feed the AI
product, training models early on with public data
sets, adopting a human-in-the-loop approach that
validates early responses with low con dence, or
adopting rules-based technology. MVP developers
need to ensure that initial customers will become the
company’s biggest champions.
A Minimum Viable
Product Requires
Minimum Viable
Performance
It is important to also take into account another MVP
— minimum viable performance. Given the target
task, how well does the product have to perform in
order to be useful? The answer is problem-speci c,
both You
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required performance level. In some applications,
being 80% successful on Day Zero might represent a
large and valuable improvement in productivity or
cost savings. But in other applications, 80% on Day
Zero might be entirely inadequate, such as for a
speech recognition system.
The goal is to beat the baseline, not the world. A good
standard may be to simply ask, “How can a minimum
viable AI product improve upon the status quo?” Even
large software companies need to ask this question.
At Salesforce.com, sales propensity models that
predict which customers and leads are likely to
respond to various sales activities were among the
rst tools developed with Salesforce’s AI product,
Einstein. This tool was an easy addition because all
the data was already in the Salesforce cloud, and the
predictive machine learning models were a familiar
technology to the sales sta that would use the
information. Even an imperfect ranking of customers
to call on is probably better than a salesperson’s
unaided intuition.
It’s also a good idea for an AI MVP to support a “low-
hanging fruit” business process. In the case of
Verusen, the company focused its tool on parts
inventory management, which is typically conducted
in an ad hoc way. By structuring and improving that
process, Verusen was able to show millions of dollars
in savings to each of its early customers.
MVP-oriented thinking is important with any type of
system, and AI is no exception — no matter how
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exciting the technology seems all on its own. Users
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can adopt a minimally viable AI product without large
expenditures of time or money, and it can be
improved with feedback from early clients. With that
type of thinking, products and internal applications
can proceed smoothly from useful-but-basic
capabilities to transformational o erings.
Topics
Managing Technology Data, AI, & Machine Learning
New Product Development AI & Machine Learning
Technology Innovation Strategy
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Thomas H. Davenport (@tdav) is the President’s Distinguished
Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson
College, a visiting professor at Oxford University’s Säid School of
Business, a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy,
and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s AI and Analytics practice. He is
also an adviser to Glasswing Ventures. Rudina Seseri is founder
and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, leading the rm’s
investments in AI-enabled enterprise software as a service,
cloud, IT software, and vertical markets.
TAGS: Arti cial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Product
Design, Product Development, Technology Startups
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