Eric Schmidt: People make the world go round. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images) GETTY IMAGES

There’s plenty of consternation about artificial intelligence replacing many jobs and roles across the economic spectrum, — from salespeople to truck drivers to doctors. It’s worth mentioning, however, that market dominance will go to those innovators — human innovators, that is — who can assemble AI and machine learning-based components to move products and services more efficiently to customers. Successful entrepreneurs from this point forward will be maestros who can lead an AI symphony.

The people who know how to put this all together will make the world go round. While AI is making many world-changing accomplishments possible — from self-driving cars to biological breakthroughs — none of this is possible without motivated, involved people. This is where too many companies still fall flat.

Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet/Google, knows a thing or two about the power of motivated, talented people. Speaking at the recent McKinsey BLINK Conference in the United Kingdom, he stated that all the data in the world won’t matter without the right talent.

He even shot down the conventional wisdom that having a wealth of data will put a company ahead of the game. With evolving AI solutions, large caches of data may not be required. “There’s a great deal of research on how to build algorithms using much less data than is currently required,” he explained. “This notion that he or she who has the most data wins is ultimately going to be a temporal phenomenon.”

If not data, what will give companies the edge in an intensely competition digital landscape? “What we’ll discover is that he or she who has the smartest engineers developing the smartest algorithms is the one who will win,” he says.