Will AI enable a big revolution in the education scenario ?

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research. Wikipedia

The above definition of Education is very vast, sweeping and cuts across the breadth and width of human civilization.  So far we were depending on the human route to enable transfer of skills and knowledge from one generation to the next. With increase in population and the vastness of knowledge that needs to be transferred along with the multiple branches of knowledge that exists today, the correct streamlining of this knowledge, information and skills to the multude of people across the different continents of the world is very daunting. Can AI help to solve this crisis and how ?

I happened to go through couple of international publications in this regard. Ron Schmelzer in July '19, Forbes (click here) shares some ideas of applications of AI in education.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help education in many striking ways. It can be used in the following ways.

1. Personalised learning - Instead of providing a single syllabus for all the students, learning will be personalised. What to learn personally, divide learning into small convenient modules for asynchronous learning and asynchronous testing, preparation of custom learning modules and learning material for students. This will also include online interface and feedback from teachers and Professors

2. making use of AI Personal Assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri to provide conversation interaction to students that assists in collecting teaching material, educational assistance, setting reminders, alarms, to help answer small queues of students and to help in adaptive learning.

Adaptive learning, also known as adaptive teaching, is an educational method which uses computer algorithms to orchestrate the interaction with the learner and deliver customized resources and learning activities to address the unique needs of each learner. Wikipedia

3. aiding in administrative tasks like admission, examinations etc. that take faculty time away from students. This time can be reallocated to students increasing the faculty student interaction time. With AI Personal assistants taking the rote tasks of admission, institutional information seeking, arranging for field visits , placement activities etc more time is available for faculty to interact with students.

4. breaking barriers, cutting across the quality of the institution, teachers etc., AI systems can help ensure impartial decision making based on academic merit, improving the fairness and quality of the admission process.

An HBR article in Oct '19 by Lasse Rohinianen titled How AI and data would personalise higher education, (click here) talks of personalised learning that can be administered by AI to each student  for unique experiences helping Professors be more effective in teaching. This helps identify early student problems, avoiding students quitting and enabling successful completion. 

Chat bots that interacted with students in the University of Mursia in Spain helped improve the motivation levels of students by 91%. Understanding student interest and preferences, new courses and experiences were introduced to improve student learning, educational experiences, delivering the right knowledge and skills to improve later adult life professional accomplishments.

Chat bots can also help give mental health counseling to students. 

The challenges that were observed were

1. preparing students for tech based world

2. preparing students for digital transformation

3. AI cannot help in imparting creative, cognitive and emotional intelligence skills. This requires human intervention. 

Only Professors can help students by providing guidance, support, mentoring, understand the importance of what is being learnt and its practical applications. AI cannot help in this area.

With the invasion of AI in education, students need to understand how 

1. Algorithms use data to make decisions, 

2. how the data should remain private, 

3. how the data is being used and 

4. the design and development of AI systems.

A human-AI hybrid machine only can finally benefit humanity as a whole ..

George..

What is being customer centered like ?

Customer-centric (also known as client-centric) is a business strategy that's based on putting your customer first and at the core of your business in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. - superoffice.com 

Happened to read the article in HBR of Oct '18 on 6 ways to build a customer centric culture by Denis Lee Yvon. (click here) 

A company which gives the best product and service to customer will never ever fall short of customers as existing satisfied customers will help new customers to try the product. 

Customer centredness in other words means creating a positive experience for the customers. Getting the operations personnel in the organisation to understand the customer concerns and his/her pain points will help the organisation to understand the organisation better. 

This includes the following points 

1. maximise service / product offerings 

2. build relationships 

3. respect customer preferences 

4. keep cusomer satisfaction at the forefront of business growth 

5. engage with customers in innovative ways to understand customer preferences'

6. include customers in corporate decision making 

7. include customer in futire product/ service planning of the company 

8. involve customer to know his/her pain points in the interaction and try to solve them 

9. give more than what the customer wants or asks for 

10. given quality items and service offerings to customers to ensure repeat purchases 

11. meeting customers in person in fixed time intervals 

As per the above author, the organisation can build a customer centric culture as given below 

1. operationalise customer empathy 

2. hire for customer orientation 

3. decentralise customer insights 

4. facilitate interactions of employees with customers 

5. link employee culture to customer outcomes 

6. tieng employee compensation with customer service, giving employees skin in the game

7. adding strong reverse logistics network to handle customer returns unsatisfied products

 Amazon is said to be one of the best customer centred organisations in the world be it in the case of forward logistics or reverse logistics (returning unliked or poor quality items) without asking a single qiestion. The author heas been a beneficiary of this ASmazon India customer centred approach many a time and is highly appreciative of it.

The amazing growth of Amazon globally is indicative of the extreme customer centred approach it nourishes as part of the company culture.  

A University or a Learning Experience Center ?

When I was reading that Amazon is the most customer centered company in the world, I never expected it to be really obsessed with the customer.  Reading about Amazon and how in 1994, when I was teaching at the Goa govt. Engineering College, after PG in Industrial Engineering  and teaching Information systems to PG students, Bezos had already setup Amazon, after completing BSE from Princeton in 1986. I too completed my BTech in '86 from Govt. Engg college, Trivandrum CET, in India. The similarity is very striking. Bezos went ahead with an entrepreneurial zeal.

Taking a cue from Bezos, I was thinking loud, should we rename Universities as Customer Learning Experience Center. (CLEC) ..

Watch the video at 2012 re:invent meeting interaction .. (click here)

In the above video, Bezos explains the growth of Amazon Web Services, his personal experience with Lean systems, waste removal etc..

Passion and customer centricity are the two great qualities any entrepreneur should have ..

Between customers and competitors,  an entrepreneur should focus on customers..

 

George..

Is Uber a Disruptive or Strategic Innovation ?

The other day I was listening to an HBR podcast by Alexander MacKay, faculty member from Harvard Business School describing Uber's global strategy (click here). 

Uber the ride sharing app introduced by Travis Kalanick in 2009, has now changed to become the world's largest ridesharing app with 2020 revenues of $10 billion and offering 6.2 billion rides annually, ie. 17 million rides daily. It has a market cap of $60 billion presently.

Prof. Clayton Christensen, from Harvard Business School coined the term Disruptive Innovation around 1995 through his book The Innovator's Dilemma.

To qualify as a Disruptive Innovation,  an innovation should 

• start as a low quality product or service at the low end of the market and move slowly over time, disrupting established players at different levels by offering progressively higher quality and satisfaction to the customers
• be offered initially as a cheaper alternative to the existing products or service at the lower end of the market, gradually improving over time in quality and performance dislodging established players.

Uber is not a low quality product and it is not an initial cheaper alternative. Both these reasons disqualify the Uber phenomenon being classified as a disruptive innovation. (click here).

My earlier writing in this area has made the situation very clear. (click here) Taking the case of the Indian Space research programme. Starting in 1961, it started growing, slowly disrupting the launch of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite launch market dominated by ESA etc and then in 2007, through Chandrayaan 1 to the moon disrupted major players like ESA and China Aerospace, and then in 2013 with the launch of Mangalyaan to the planet Mars disrupted NASA in terms of cost and reliable technology. ISRO has not been able to do any major space disruptions of late, but it has come to be globally recognised as a space power to be reckoned by other space powers. The cost disruption initiated by ISRO at one tenth the cost of similar missions from NASA or ESA, in the planetary missions market is indeed laudable.

Tesla has been slowly disrupting the transportation scene through the launch of their electric cars. The Kochi international airport running on solar energy is slowly started disrupting the 10 million annual traffic airports, slowly building to 50 million annual traffic and then to 95 million, slowly disrupting the Jacksonville airport in US.

This article from medium (click here) explains the salient features of disruptive innovation, even though it says Uber is a disruptive innovation. Developments in AI, self driving cars, IoT applications are all going to disrupt the world in the coming days in ways humanity has not even dreamt before.

I have come up with a question set to decide whether an innovation is disruptive or strategic . Try to answer the following questions. 

1. Is there a large unmet, untapped market in need of the product or service because available goods and service are priced high for the uptrend markets ?
2. Is your product or service lesser priced than the market leaders ?
3. Is your product or service now able to meet the demand from the low quality segment of the market ?
4. Is there potential for the product or process to grow to satisfy higher end needs customers ?
5. Can the market leader drop or stoop down to your level and kick you out of the market by offering a similar low cost product or service ?

If the answers to the first four questions are YES and to the last question is NO, then your product or service is in line for a disruptive innovation. Finally we see, it is the reach, acceptance and the cost of the product or service that plays an important role to disrupt the leader and topple the apple cart. 

George..

Lean strategy and Lean Operations ..

We have heard of Lean Operations and Lean Manufacturing. What is the exact difference between these two terms. 

While Lean Operations talks of generally actions that help to improve value, reduce waste and tools to track value additions and waste reduction, Lean strategy looks at the bigger picture of how value improvement and waste reduction actions can help optimise costs and actions and help align with the organisational objective of product, sectoral and market leadership.

While going through the article Lean Strategy (click here) in HBR March '16, by HBS faculty member David Collis, the distinction is made amply clear. Getting Lean Operations to align with organisational objhectives is pretty tough and requires careful understanding of organisational processes and optimisation efforts.

This is different from the environmental strategy an organisation may adopt. click here

Is Digital Transformation about technology or talent ?

This is a very interesting question that came up while having a discussion with my faculty colleagues on the necessity of including Digital transformation topics into an advanced MBA course curriculum, like we have at Alliance School of Business, Bangalore. I am sure Indian Institutes of Management in their different campuses and XLRI, Bajaj Institutes will get to learn a lot from our experiences as and when we share them with the public. 

The other day I was going through an HBR paper titled Digital transformation is about talent, not technology (click here) by Becky and Tomas in May '20 issue. It was really an eye opener.

Innovation is otherwise called Creative Destruction. Technological Innovation and people talent go hand in hand. One may have the best technological innovation, but if the right people are not available to deploy the technology, the technology is of no use. 

Which are the other areas to concentrate for a successful digital transformation ?

• As much as technology plays a big role in Digital Transformation, it is also about investing in training people. 
• Focus on the soft skills of people of offering sup[port and the right motivation to employees 
• As all the time, the chnage should get full support from the top management and in fact should be driven by the top management.
• Data Insights available from the analysis of data using algorithms should be acted upon to take advantage. Data is the new Oxygen for the industry.
• Digital transformations are not bound to be successful from the word go, it can fail, but fail fast, so that corrective actions can be resorted to. If failing fast is not possible, learn slow and succeed slowly should be the guiding principle.

The above points lead us to the conclusion that Digital Transformation is much as about developing the right talent, as it is about having the right technology.

George..

Intro case on SCM

This case from Business India on the challenges faced by the Indian dairy industry, by Mother Dairy in Delhi, is a good intro case to Supply chain management, taken from the text book on SCM written by Prof. B. Mahadevan from Production and Operations area of IIM Bangalore .

Even though it is more than six years old, this is an excellent case to explain to the students the need for Supply Chain Management, on the complexities faced by the Indian supply chains, especially how complicated is the dairy supply chain in India. The extent of uncertainties, the varied players, the transportation and storage complexities is really an eye opener for students. 

I circulate copies in the class and students respond wonderfully whenever I have taken this case to introduce SCM to the students.

A big thanks to Business India and Prof. Mahadevan from IIMB.

George