An excerpt from my new book, How I Got Started with A.I.

Before I left the U.S in early 2012., I spent a good six months doing research on the state of analytics in the Philippines. At that point, the concept of analytics was still quite elementary across just about every segment of business, of government and of higher education.

Taken as a whole, besides traditional MS excel heavy, management reporting there was a general lack of awareness what analytics was and how it could be used. There is a term that many Filipino businessmen use to explain how they make most of their business decision… gut feel.

Needless to say, to build a business around analytics training, I would have to expend a lot of time and energy on general awareness and making business cases before I would see a lot of profit coming my way.

So, I set out to do as talking about analytics as I could. Speaking at just about any kind of business event, giving guest lectures as school, I even had gave a talk to a group of high school educators in a hot gym with no AC and no PowerPoint.

Not only was I doing training, I started get invited to speak at different conferences. I became a featured speaker, and then eventually one of the most in-demand Technology speakers in Southeast Asia over the course of the next several years. I was doing this in thing, amazing thing was that the conference I was working with was incredibly broad.

The one thing that I found during this period of my career was it pretty much every industry is a potential client base. Any company that has data, that has people working with the data has a commitment to using the data to make decisions but the decision-makers don’t feel like they’re getting value.

And over the next 3 years things really started to accelerate, which is meant

At this point you might be starting to ask yourself what does this has to do with artificial intelligence. Well, here is my point I had to go to extremes to get senior leaders and influencers on board. When I started, the idea of how to use analytics daily in a business was not commonplace. Which parallels to where we are now, here in the U.S. when it comes to A.I.

In many cases I’ve come across with small businesses here, it actually takes more effort to prepare companies to get ready to use A.I. than it does to actually implement A.I. itself.

If you have a grand vision to get to the top of the mountain in your industry, you have to start the climb somewhere and it helps a lot to know how low down the mountain your base camp is.

Daniel Meyer heads Sonic Analytics, an analytics advocacy with offices in Manila, the San Francisco Bay Area and as of February 2019, Ocala, FL. With over 20 years in Big Data, Dan is one of the most sought-after public speakers in Asia and offers big data coaching and analytics training seminarson both sides of the Pacific. Dan has also recently joined the Powerteam International family as a small business analytics resource speaker. 

Sonic Analytics(www.sonicanalytics.com) brings big data analytics solutions like business intelligence, business dashboards and data storytelling to small and medium sized organizations looking to enhance their data-driven decision-making capabilities. We also advocate the use of analytics for civic responsibility through training, consulting and education.

As citizens of this great democracy, we need to look at the data (analytics), plan a course of action (strategy) and share our data-driven viewpoints (presentation). This approach to a data savvy work force starts in school. So, we started an internship program to empower our youth to use Analytics, plan Strategy and Present their insights… ASP!

When not training current and future analysts, you can find Dan championing the use of analytics to empower data-driven citizenship by volunteering his expertise with schools and non-profits dedicated to evidence-based social progress like Saint Leo University’s Women in STEAM 2020 Conference.