Where am I heading next? - Senior Sales Professional - Self-Studying AI

Introductions
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Dear DeepLearning.AI Community,

After embarking on a very deep personal development journey these last two years with different meditation, mindfulness and yoga practices I’ve decided on a more concentrated career path. While spending the last 13 years in the tech industry, IT/telco/video, as a Sales Rep I feel that I’ve been all over the map, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

After searching within I’ve decided that I wanted to take the leap towards AI, as I’ve ventured into my own conciousness I also want to venture into the Artificial Mind.

After completing AI for Everyone and GenAI for Everyone here at DL.AI, reading and listening to literature, following trends online in various forums, trying out applications out there… The List goes on. But I feel that I would love to get some human input (Thank you LLM’s for all your valuable input).

I usually learn best through practical experience, as a Sales Rep (AM, KAM, BDM, SM) my strength lies not within theory and calculus, I learn by being out there, working with people and the applications first hand, meeting the end-users, operations and management.

I need practical experience of AI. I would consider taking on an internship due to the lack of AI experience, even though I have technical sales experience within business to business of over 13 years.

So to the question(s):

Should I delve deeper into the course material here or would that be a waste of time considering that I want to work with Sales within the field of AI?

How and where does one get a foot in the door into an AI company without having specific AI background?

I would love to hear your ideas, all are welcome!

Thank you so much.

Kind regards

Jonathan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathankuusela/

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I have no useful career advice, that’s not my role as a course mentor.
But a couple of general tips might be useful:

You’d be extremely lucky to find an internship given you have little experience.

Yes. The typical path is the Machine Learning Specialization, then the Deep Learning Specialization, then branch out into whatever areas fit your interests.

It’s the same as how you break into any starter job. You polish up your skills, and do the electronic online equivalent of knocking-on-doors, apply a lot of perseverance, and you need some measure of luck.

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Thank you @TMosh for your quick and much valuable response. I do so appreciate it!

However, I do have some follow-up questions regarding the MLS-course, since you are recommending it.

When I look over the syllabus it seems to be highly technical where one is building models throughout the course? Where one has to have somewhat background within programming as well in maths?

But in the top of that landing page I linked earlier in this message the course seems to be for all levels with no prior background? Which makes me a little confused. Which one is it, do I need a math/programming background or not?

Again, I am not looking to get into AI to be a programmer, my interests lie in understanding the concepts of AI from an eagle eye’s perspective where I then would head into companies or organizations driving projects from a sales perspective. Not much for analogies but car salesmen aren’t necessarily manufacturing the cars themselves, they do hopefully understand them though, but above all they understand people. If that makes sense?

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All of the deep learning courses assume you have at least rudimentary programming experience in Python.

Math knowledge isn’t critical, the fundamentals are presented in the lectures, and if you want to understand the ‘why’ behind them, you’d need to study that further (linear algebra and a bit of statistics).

When you mentioned trying to get an internship, I assumed you wanted a technology job.

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Hello Jonathan @jonathankuusela,

Should we use your experience in sales to help decide what to do next in AI?

I am raising this point because I was a R&D engineer and I had to source and purchase hardware and software a lot, during which I worked with many sales.

I was used to tell them my requirements and concerns, and when there was a choice to make, we discussed a bit deeper into the technical side. I shared my consideration, they built upon that with their experience.

I remember I asked a few sales persons how they knew so much. Usually they would humbly tell me because they had learned a lot from previous clients. In my heart, I couldn’t think of anything they could learn from me. In my heart, I knew what I had done to know what they knew. I admired them.

Maybe they reached there after countless conversations with clients and techicians? Maybe they took courses (but online courses were not popular at that time)? Maybe they had worked as a tech?

What do you think, as a sales and as someone who have known many bright sales? How does a person become a successful sales in a tech field?

Should that be a question of how you could turn whatever you learn there into something useful for your sales work? Maybe while someone is learning how to build a model, you would be learning how your tech client thinks when building a model?

Comparing to junior sales or a purely tech guy like me, I believe you have the advantage of looking at things from the sales angle, and that’s why I am trying to reorient this discussion in the above way.

The machine learning specialization is more a fundamental course. It starts to show more specific use cases in the 3rd course of the series but the materials are still presented in the way of how to implement them. While implementing them itself may not be most interesting to you, maybe you can focus more on the thinking process and on how Andrew discusses the pros & cons?

Those discussions might not be directly related to a sales decision, but the knowledge might be useful in opening a conversation or developing a good relationship?

Cheers,
Raymond, someone who is not a sales but had worked with many good sales

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Thank you again @TMosh for taking the time answering here. Much appreciated!

Well, I would say that the introductory courses called “AI for Everyone” and “GenAI for Everyone” has been super useful for me to get an understanding of AI as a whole, and that is without any technical/programming background at all. I think it would be super useful courses to teach anyone out there trying to understand AI. But as mentioned, the next step if one would like to delve deeper into the course material without getting too technical isn’t as clear, it seems to be quite the leap heading into the Specialization courses.

Well, I’m open to an Internship at any AI focused company just to get to understand how one of these companies operates, shadowing different teams there, to get the experience I am after. I am looking to combine what I am good at, bringing that to the table of company in development which is working within a field I have a personal interest in, which is AI.

We’ll see where I end up.

Thank you again for taking the time!

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Dear @rmwkwok,

Thank you for your highly interesting reply on this subject and matter! I appreciate you!

Heading into the age of AI I think we need the input of the society as a whole, we cannot rely on specific groups of people to steer us into this age and faith. Your input is as valuable as mine and so on.

I am happy to hear that you’ve had valuable and positive encounters with Sales Reps, in all line of businesses you’ll encounter both good ones and bad ones. It’s the nature of things.

I can’t speek for all Sales Reps out there, only me, and I have a nack of understanding things due to my curious nature and it certainly helps if you are interested in the subject at hand. You’ve probably encountered highly motivated and interested Sales Reps that is listening and extracting all they can from within their organization as well as externally. That is at least how I would act and how I would learn… And also combining that with ones own creativity.

Listening and paying attention is key.

I completely agree with you on the second topic, looking at the course material from my perspective, and that is what I’ve been doing so far. Such a valuable input and a clever one. What I’m worried about though is enrolling in a hefty course that costs money and also time where I won’t be able to neither get everything completed for the certificate nor actually understanding the material shared or most of it that’s being shared. That would not be very useful.

I’m going to give this a little bit more thought and we’ll see where I’m going with this.

I thank you kindly for your warm input and feedback, very valuable! And I also wish you all the best in your endeavours!

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