Starting a new tech project is always a major challenge. It's hard to come up with a feasible business idea, convince the investors your idea is worthy, build the actual product and convince the customer to buy your product, juggling the risks and uncertainties all the way in highly competitive environment. Putting Artificial Intelligence in the core of your business normally makes your project more attractive and visible, but also brings in additional challenges and uncertainties, those conditioned by non-deterministic nature of AI itself, the fact that at times building an AI product feels more like scientific research than software engineering, and the difficulty of distilling spectacular, but not so readily usable "AI magic" into tangible customer value.

When it comes to hiring strategy, it's tempting to say you need the top talent for everything, but those are normally very busy and often not readily available. The other extreme, i.e. to invite whoever is available and hope that their ambitions, self-motivation, and hard work alone will yield the desired results, is often infeasible in reality. The best is balancing the two: to hire, or partner with, one or two top-notch professionals so they can guide and teach their less experienced colleagues, ensuring great overall quality of work at the same time.

The benefits of having an ultra-experienced member in your team are obvious: this raises the quality of decision-making, technical and business alike, enables faster adoption of best practices, allows to achieve results in less time as more senior professionals use to see shorter paths and know what works and what doesn't, and, to some extent, gives the team peace of mind, as they feel they won't be left alone if something goes wrong, and they always have somebody to learn from. All in all, in the context of fast-paced business environment, it is better to rely on somebody's existing experience rather than expecting everybody to gain their own experience through hardships and failures.

The important thing is that such experts not only must be the ones who can do the things on their own, but also be able to transfer their precious knowledge to the rest of the team. This is not normally efficiently achieved by mere lecturing or giving out ready solutions, instead, it's best if the expert will teach and guide the team inspiring independent approach and responsible attitude, much like best school and college teachers do, except it's a budget- and time-constrained set-up. Much like business management, teaching is an art of its own, and those who master teaching alongside their professional skills make great mentors. A carefully chosen mentor can save your project a lot of time and money, improve working comfort for the founders and the team, and increase the overall viability and competitiveness of the project as a whole.

As an experienced AI developer with substantial research, teaching and mentorship background, I am open to opportunities of becoming a mentor for a project that I'll find interesting. My experience so far includes the applications of AI in Software Security, Supply Chain Management, Predictive Maintenance, Manufacturing Quality, Operations Research, and Computer Vision, and I am open to collaboration in virtually any area. Please learn How I Can Help, explore the details of my past experience in Case Study section, alongside Feedback And Recommendations from my colleagues, and, in case you are interested, feel free to Contact Me.