Living with failure

Living with failure

… might be the most important skill in AI innovation.

AI innovation is hard. Not intellectually hard. Hard in the way that most things simply don’t work the first time.

Or the third.

The model disappoints. The prototype breaks. The use case nobody could stop talking about turns out to be a use case nobody actually needs.

People like ideas because ideas feel like progress. They like projects because projects have plans, milestones and endings.

Innovation has none of those guarantees.

It runs on resilience and grit far more than it runs on ideas.

Which is why the most valuable outcome of an AI project might not be the project.

It’s the people who learned how to try.

Build enough capability in them and something interesting happens: every failed experiment makes the next experiment a little better.

That’s the part that compounds.