Quick quiz: If you randomly sampled just 5 people from a population of 20,000 or more, could you use that data to tell your stakeholders anything useful? For most data scientists, the answer is probably no. But according to Douglas Hubbard, author of How to Measure Anything, “you need far less data than you think.” Here’s the proof: If you randomly sample just five people from an organisation of any size and record the lowest and highest values of whatever you’re measuring, there’s a 93.75%...
6 days ago • 1 min read
I learned the true meaning of accountability on a Sunday morning, many years ago, when I had to go into the office to fix a calculation mistake made by a member of my team. I was an insurance pricing manager at the time. My team performed premium calculations that brought in $2 billion of revenue. It was complex work, spread across multiple staff, and the margin for error was incredibly low. When my boss spotted an error in a table my team had produced, it was all I could do not to say:...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Machine learning excels at automating routine decisions. But the decisions that matter most are far from routine. The decisions that truly make or break an organisation are the high-stakes, one-off decisions where data is scarce, machine learning falls apart, and executive stakeholders are left relying on their gut. These are also the situations where data scientists have the potential to add the greatest value - if they know how. As a data scientist with a background in actuarial science and...
13 days ago • 1 min read
As a lifelong movie fan, the two stars whose careers stand out as being the most impressive to me are Tom Cruise and Adam Sandler. Hear me out. Cruise built a career based on unrelenting excellence. The Mission Impossible movies are pretty darn impressive and that didn't happen by mistake. By focusing on making movies of undeniable quality, he was able to make his work speak louder than his personality. Sandler, on the other hand, is in many ways the anti-Cruise. Yes, Billy Madison is...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Earlier this year, entrepreneur Mark Cuban posted the following on X: “There are generally two types of LLM users: those that use it to learn everything, and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything.” As this quote suggests, AI has the potential to dramatically expand what data scientists can do. But used without care, it also has the potential to quietly erode the expertise that makes them valuable in the first place. Given my expertise took over 20 years for me to build, I’ve...
20 days ago • 1 min read
A few years back, when ChatGPT was in its infancy, stories relating to AI hallucination-induced mishaps made the news on pretty much a daily basis. From lawyers filing briefs referencing non-existent cases to government reports riddled with fake citations, you could watch people learning the limitations of AI in real time. And no organisation was too big to avoid embarrassment. Although these incidents do still occur, people are now at least starting to become aware of the very real...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, it seems like there’s yet another announcement of technical workers losing their jobs to AI. In Australia, for example, tech giant Atlassian recently laid off 1,600 workers - 10% of their global workforce - “to steer more spending into AI”. Now, granted, not every AI-related job loss is necessarily as it first appears. Some experts point to AI-washing. That is, companies using AI as cover for restructuring decisions they would have made anyway. But regardless of the reason, the...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Have you ever seen the TV show Nip/Tuck? It centres on the lives and clients of two Miami plastic surgeons. But what it’s really about is the quest for perfection. The main characters want perfection in their own lives, but all they are actually capable of creating is the illusion of it. And beneath the perfect facades, all the characters are actually pretty terrible. It’s now over 20 years old, but rewatching an episode the other day made me realise it serves as a perfect metaphor for AI. AI...
30 days ago • 1 min read
Every organisation wants to be AI-first. It’s the new “data-driven” - a badge that signals ambition, modernity, and a seat at the table of the future. “In the long run, we’re evolving in computing from a ‘mobile-first’ to an ‘AI-first’ world.” - Sundar Pichai, Google “We are no longer a graphics card company… We are an AI-first company. From now on, we are betting the company on AI.” - Jensen Huang, NVIDIA “Duolingo is going to be AI-first.” - Luis von Ahn, Duolingo “Before asking for more...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read