How Your AI Project is Like a Suburban Home
Over the past week or so, I’ve been working on an “Overview of AI” talk. The facts are not the problem, it is telling the story in a way that the audience can relate to – and also remember and repeat. I’m going with a suburban home. AI is like a suburban home.
Who cares? If you are an employer contemplating (or surfing) a business transformation courtesy of AI, you know it is an expensive process. If you are an employee or vendor helping to develop or working with AI tools, you know the process is slow and full of uncertainty. The concepts are new to most people – especially those exploring generative AI and agentic systems. Informing your team with an easy overview can improve their participation, communication, productivity, and innovation.
We’ve already talked about the front door – everyone comes to AI through their own front door. But let’s back up for an overview of the floorplan of the House of AI in business.
1. The Garage (famous in brand stories, from Apple to HP), is where AI Engineering lives. Whether a vendor lives there or staff, AI for business has to be adapted, tuned and tested ongoing, to meet the requirements of a use-case.
2. The Machine Room, where the various machines that run the house are located (boiler, gas meter, etc.). AI requires machines – onsite or cloud, many companies for better or worse, consider AI to be the domain of the legacy IT dept.
3. The Basement, rarely spotless and well organized unless you really commit to it. In the House of AI, this is where data lives. For businesses, AI requires excellent data organization and management. That magic happens downstairs – in the basement.
4. The Porch, full of light and air. This is Responsible AI, where we define ethical Decision-Making about AI, transparency and explainability, check for bias. No one lives on the back porch, but everyone likes to spend time there.
5. The Kitchen, where Strategy is baked. It’s messy at first and passions can run hot. AI use-cases are like meals, each can have a different chef, recipe and ingredients. How AI will achieve a business goal is baked here.
6. The Study (or home office). This is where Accountable AI lives, where an AI project is checked for compliance (legal, regulatory, brand, social, etc.). Governance that might not occur to engineers in The Garage, is front and center in the Study.
7. The Library, across the hall from the study is where the documents generated at every step of an AI project are kept. Model cards, policies, guardrails, brand and marketing strategies that involve AI, training criteria, research. The Library.
8. The Dining Room. The big table, lots of chairs around it, is a symbol of stakeholder inclusion that is so important in an AI project. Also, it symbolizes collaboration — that AI is about people and having a human-in-the-loop — and the Board Room, a reminder that the value, risk, priority and cost of an AI project has to be unpacked and repackaged for non-technical and ultimate decision-makers.
9. Lastly, the Room of Roles, where all the titles, missing expertise, and overlapping responsibilities are assigned or repaired. The Room of Roles sounds more like a dungeon in certain night clubs (I hear), but for our Suburban home story, we’ll call it the Room of Roles.
As a general overview and conversation starter – casually provided, mostly free of jargon and hopefully, easily remembered -- these are the major components of an AI project for business. In subsequent posts, we will discover that some of these rooms are multi-dimensional and multi-story, like a scene in the movie, Inception. Also, depending on the business sector, the proportion of the rooms to one another can be dramatically different.
As a leave-behind, I’m thinking maybe a pop-up book or AI advent calendar.
If you have questions or suggestions, I’d love to hear them.