Everyone wants AI, but few know what it actually takes to deliver meaningful insights to business teams. In most of the retail and mid-market clients I’ve worked with, the problem isn’t model complexity — it’s data disorganization and inaccessible outputs. You can’t unlock AI’s potential without first getting the data infrastructure right.

One of the most impactful projects I led involved building a customer analytics platform for a retail chain. We used BigQuery and Cloud Functions to clean and unify datasets across online and offline sources. From there, we trained churn prediction models using scikit-learn. But the real magic was in the Looker dashboards we delivered — simple, visual, and actionable for marketing and operations teams.

The takeaway is this: AI doesn’t need to be mysterious. As a tech consultant, your job isn’t just to build models — it’s to connect the dots between technology and business outcomes. That means understanding the people behind the data, the decisions they need to make, and the way they prefer to consume insights. It’s about building usable intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.

Note - Photo credits go to Waseem Akram. The use of cover photo is for template purposes only.