Context Aware AI with Ram Bala

We recently interviewed Ram Bala, a professor at Santa Clara University and founder and chief product and AI officer at Samvid.

The focus of the conversation was on bringing context to AI. This is timely for me. I’ll be giving a talk next week that covers the importance of supply chain context.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

Context has layers. It is easy to think about giving AI context about your business and strategy. But Ram went further. He gave an example suggesting you want your procurement and legal teams to operate in different contexts. You need that healthy conflict to make the right trade-offs.

You need to do the work to create context. Your ERP system doesn’t have it. It won’t be easy, but this is how you get AI payoffs.

Governance is also about “hiring.” Obvious AI governance includes security, human-in-the-loop practices, and maybe auditing. But it can also include a “hiring” aspect. Maybe you put a process in place to decide if the marginal value of an agent doing something is worth it— just like you would with hiring decisions. This reminded me of Ethan Mollick asking what you are actually going to do with the extra productivity? Do you really want to create 100s of more PowerPoints quickly?

He thought organizations would evolve slowly, rather than be completely disrupted. AI changes how information flows and how decisions are made. As this happens, organizations will adjust.

For more, check out the podcast or his book:

---