Richie CottonSenior Data Evangelist, DataCamp · Ask me about data and AI upskilling

This Is When AI Actually Pays Off #shorts #AI

Name: This Is When AI Actually Pays Off #shorts #AI
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T14:00:53+00:00
Duration: 1 min 17 s
Channel: Richie Cotton
Description: In this short monologue, the speaker argues that AI initiatives should target the biggest possible impact rather than modest incremental improvements…

23 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:17

In this short monologue, the speaker argues that AI initiatives should target the biggest possible impact rather than modest incremental improvements, because the cost of change outweighs small gains. They advise prioritizing use cases that can deliver orders-of-magnitude benefits and warn against wasting effort on low‑value AI experiments. The speaker then describes Sigma AI applications that let end users, via natural language and spreadsheet‑like interfaces, directly query billions of rows in a data warehouse at the row level, perform discovery, generate insights, and trigger live actions on the data. They note that 5,000 such AI applications have been built in the past 15 months, illustrating rapid scaling of this capability.

Chapters

My suspicion is over the next couple of years, we'll start to see more of these aha moments where people think, this is not 30% better than what I'm doing. It's a hundred times better than what I'm doing. If you try to put a 15% improvement in front of somebody, typically just the cost of change is too high. Yeah, it's 15% better, but I have to learn something new. I have to work to bring this system in. I'm not going to do that. Like, it's just not worth it for the 15%. So I don't know, it's so much recommending a great place to get started. As I come back to. My other answer is like, where's the biggest difference going to be made? And just do that. Don't waste your efforts, don't waste your time. For the just the sake of trying AI stuff, apply it to the thing that would have the biggest possible outcome for you so that your efforts are going to pay off. Predictive shows up when you act on it. And apps, AI apps for Sigma are now the ability for that same end user who, because of language and because of spreadsheets, can get direct access to billions of rows of data at like literally the row level. So they can do the same sort of discovery and analysis, come up with a perspective. They can reconcile that perspective and they can say, under this condition, I want this thing to happen. That was always something that would happen elsewhere, right? They would swivel chair into a different system and then they would take an action. They can do that live on warehouse data today. So we've had 5,000 applications at this point built in literally the last 15 months.