From the course: AI in Fintech Essential Training (2019)

How does AI work?

From the course: AI in Fintech Essential Training (2019)

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How does AI work?

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- [Instructor] One of the neat things about the democratization of AI is that it's coming to a lot of applications you might be familiar with. Excel is one such example. I'm in the 02_02_Begin Excel file. Now, what we've got here is just a short list of different companies based on their stock ticker symbols and a short list of countries. And the neat thing here is that Excel has recently implemented new features that allow us to pull data based on these particular data types, and that data is key for any AI applications we might want to use. So, the first of these new data types is what's called Stocks. As the name implies, we can take any ticker symbol and convert it into a stock data type, and then pull data based on that. So for instance, I'll highlight the Apple cell and then click Stocks. Now, look what happened. Excel goes through and says, "Oh, I recognize this. "We're looking for Apple." So, I'll highlight the others, and I'm going to do the same thing. And we see them all converted, except for our last one, Toyota Motors. Notice, again, this highlights one of the challenges with Excel and with AI in general. We sometimes run into confusion about particular data points. So, I'm going to let Excel know that I'm interested in Toyota Motors. Now, I can pull data on any of these companies and their stocks by clicking this little symbol that you see, which says Insert Data. So, I'm going to click on this particular tab. I'm going to highlight the whole row, just to make it easy for us, click Insert Data, and let's just pretend I'm interested in, say, the number of employees the firm has. I'll click that. Look what happens. Autopopulates, and we could name this Employees. Similarly, I could go through, and I could pull data on, say, the headquarters for that company. Where's the firm located? And we get the address for each company. And I'll just label this HQ. In addition, we can do something similar with countries. Excel now has a new Geography type that lets us pull data on geographic areas. So, I've gone through, highlighted my three countries, and perhaps I'm interested in, say, the area of those countries, the geographic area. I can pull that data very quickly and simply. I could pull data on things like the birth rates in those countries. Maybe I'm interested in how fast the country is growing, which'll ultimately be linked to birth rate. At this point, you should have a good idea of how we can start to pull data from a variety of sources using tools as simple as Excel in order to power our AI efforts.

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