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Magic Box

 Saw this very excellent visual come through my LinkedIn feed recently and could not agree more. Companies imagine there is this box bearing untold riches and gifts all tagged AIML All they need to do is to summon up their data to open it and out the other comes business value pouring. First hard thing is to tell them such box does not exist. 

When you say that as a vendor, they assume you must not be good enough so they RFI and RFP around to guided by the Magic Quadrant to hear from the best and the rest. When no box is forthcoming from anyone, they might return to you to build them one. Now comes the second hard message to convey - the box can be built but it will be expensive and time consuming for all of the reasons in the bottom half of the visual. 

They dislike this answer even more than the first. More RFPs follow to find someone who will do it on the cheap. Some vendors raise their hands just to get their foot in the door. They get in, get stuck in the mud real bad, worse things ensure. Everyone wishes they had not won the deal or walked away when they had a chance. After the dust settles, after many box makers have come and gone, the data science people carry on business as usual - they do deliver value but it is in proportion to effort, no magic wand stuff coming out of AIML boxes.

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