Data Mining with Artificial Intelligence is Making Businesses Smarter

Social media has caused an explosion in the amount of data generated by people and businesses in the last five years.

Yet, data without analysis is worthless.

That has led to the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning coupled with the input of humans to make sense of streams of data, according to experts on Argo Digital’s panel Sunday at South by Southwest on “How Data and Machine Learning/AI Affect Risk Transfer in the 21st Century.”

Jason Abbruzzese, business reporter with Mashable, moderated the panel for Argo Digital, an emerging insure tech practice within property and casualty carrier ARGO, based in San Antonio.

By analyzing the data, all businesses are trying to make themselves smarter, said Andy Breen, senior vice president for Argo Digital and adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business and one of the panelists.

Until recently, the tools did not exist to sift through all the data and extract insights that make a business operate better, he said. Every day, people and companies generate all kinds of streams of new data on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more.

“There was definitely a time when it was very uncomfortable, but now we have the tools to deal with it,” he said.

The fact that we have all this data out there is not very interesting, said Andrew Bocskocsky, co-founder and CEO of Grata Data and another panelist. Companies have been using data as long as data has been available, he said.

“When we start having buy in from industry it starts getting interesting,” he said. “We can generate value and get results everyone is happy with.”

Sambit Sahu, adjunct professor of computer science at Columbia University, and another panelist, said to get great analysis, companies need great data. He is also a data/telco analytics research scientist who was involved with the IBM Watson program.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Sahu said. “The data collection is only as good as the data quality.”

That’s why businesses like Argo are looking for new ways to collect data. For example, with a restaurant, Argo is learning new ways to assess risk, Breen said. It is now deploying sensors, drones and other internet of things devices to create new data streams continually, he said.

“Getting data constantly through the stream changes the conversation,” he said. “We can then talk to them about risk management.”

And data collection works hand in hand with humans, Breen said.