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What’s It Like Being an Entrepreneur in Emerging Markets? Inventure$ Conference Sheds Light

Inventure$ conference in Calgary Canada

Last week Christian and I had the opportunity to speak at the annual Inventure$ conference in Calgary Canada, addressing an audience of fellow entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, startups and thought leaders about my entrepreneurial journey and some best practices I’ve learned along the way.

The key takeway? Organizational change is not linear, but requires many different pathways, recalculations and stops and starts along the way. For those companies however, willing to take the risk, the effort is well worth it.

And, the risk takers, are also often called early adopters – those entrepreneurs who are willing to come to the game early and adopt the new technologies that will give them competitive advantage – even if all the kinks aren’t worked out yet.

Especially with today’s data-driven AI and predictive analytics, there’s really no time to wait. As I explained to conference attendees, your entrepreneurial data – your customer profiles, historical information, product data – is really the lifeblood of your organization. Data-driven ones, that recognize the value of their data and its role in today’s early AI solutions, are the ones who will come out ahead of the pack.

The late adopters, or technology laggards, will be at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to AI adoption, because it’s not something that generates benefits overnight. AI requires very unique data – and lots of it – in order to train algorithms to solve the business problem you’re applying it to. For this reason, laggards are not only late to the game, but they will constantly be scrambling to catch up.

Being an entrepreneur always involves risk — and it comes from all sides. Taking a risk on new technologies, like AI and predictive analytics, however, can go a long way to actually mitigating risk and arming entrepreneurs with data-driven insights to make better decisions and to ultimately take their business to the next level.

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