Here’s another one of my occasional posts about books I’ve been sent free copies of. Full disclosure: as always, these aren’t reviews as such, they’re more like free publicity in return for the free books and I don’t pretend to be unbiased; also the Amazon UK links have a affiliate code in that gives me a kickback if you buy any of these books.
The AI Value Playbook, Lisa Weaver-Lambert
What am I doing covering an AI book here? Lisa is an ex-colleague of mine at Microsoft and I respect her opinions. Also, I suspect like a lot of you, I have mixed feelings about the current AI boom: I can see the value in AI but I can also see the vast amount of hype and the obviously ridiculous claims being made. More than anything I see senior executives talking confidently about a subject I’m sure they don’t understand, and that is clearly a big problem. This book aims to help solve that problem by providing a practical guide to AI for non-technical leaders, in the form of a series of case studies and interviews with entrepreneurs and C-level people in the AI space. This is a very readable book – Lisa has talked to a lot of interesting, knowledgeable people – and the format makes it a lot more palatable for the target audience of your boss’s boss’s boss than your average tech book. As a technical person who isn’t by any means an AI expert I also enjoyed reading it.
Spend any time on public Power BI forums and you’ll see a lot of questions from people who want to know how to start a career in Power BI or get tips for Power BI interviews; as a result I’m sure there’s a big market for a book like this. It’s a mix of technical topics (the type that you might be asked about in a technical interview for a Power BI job) and non-technical advice such as how to network on LinkedIn, negotiate salaries and acecpt or reject a job offer. That might seem a bit of a strange combination but it works and the advice is both detailed and very sensible, so as a result I would have no hesitation in recommending this to anyone trying to get a job as a Power BI developer.