“No stone should go unturned in a persons desire for knowledge.”
TL;DR Spend the time to learn AI/ML hands-on, self-paced or dedicated. Be disciplined and write lots of Python. Identify your north star and what you want to solve with AI/ML. Solve it, build it or join a team that is transforming that pursuit.
My story… I took a career break in 2024 to figure out what was next for me. I wanted to do something with AI but didn’t know what. At the time the hype started full swing. I played around with Midjourney, DALL·E, ChatGPT, OpenAI APIs and other AI tools which added to the excitement. So many options! All exciting and a bit overwhelming. Almost like I needed AI to tell me what AI to spend time learning. After my experimental phase it was time to pull the engine apart. So I went back to school.
2024 I went all in and engaged in a post-graduate program at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and Great Learning on a deep dive into AI/ML for business applications.
Hands down personally and professionally one of the most prewarding programs over my career. All of the projects were hands-on and focused on specific areas of AI/ML; Identify plants for a farmer (Computer Vision), predict why a bank is losing customers (Neural Networks), how are stocks being impacted based on news (Sentiment Analysis) and others I list below. The most important thing was that I was solving real world business problems. This made me see beyond the hype of playing with AI and actually solving enterprise business problems.
Below are the projects of the program. Each of them builds on the different areas of AI/ML. Python, EDA, Univariant/Bivariant analysis and more. All hands-on work, which I find the best way to learn.
| Project Name | Topic |
|---|---|
| Stock Market News Sentiment Analysis | Natural Language Processing |
| Plant Seeding Classification | Computer Vision |
| Personal Loan Campaign | Machine Learning |
| Restaruant Turonver Prediction | Advanced Machine Learning (Hackathon) |
| Bank Churn Prediction | Neural Networks |
| Credit Card Users Churn Predicition | Advanced Machine Learning |
| Food Hub | Python Foundations |
Good luck on your AI journey.