These are the practical uses for artificial intelligence in business

Schneider Electric Chief Digital Officer Herve Coureil sat down with TechRepulic’s Dan Patterson and talked about practical uses for AI in business. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Dan Patterson: This may sound like an elementary question. Practical uses. Right? How are we seeing not just business use AI now? I think we can all kind of point to some examples, but give me the next 18 to 36 months and help us understand, should companies, should enterprise companies, build, buy, or innovate?

Herve Coureil: That’s a good one. My own take on that is that, I mean, make or buy are the usual two polar opposite, but actually, there are many shades of partnership in the middle that actually are really interesting. We are spending quite a bit of time on all those shades in the middle, so it could be crowdsourcing, it could be working with data science platforms or startups, et cetera. But then really co-developing, co-innovating, et cetera. So we try to move a bit away from this make versus buy and try to be a little bit more creative in the middle.

There’s tons of exciting things we are working on, actually, from an AI standpoint. We have a team that’s supercharged. We are actually developing more and more algorithms. We’re also starting to think also about the governance of the algorithm, how you expose them for API, how you make sure that if somebody already exists you reuse it, you don’t reinvent something else, et cetera. So there’s a notion of governance that is also kicking in. And then machine learning, of course, is a big deal, but we’re also looking at other things like applying, for instance, via Asian network to understand a network of data in the building and being able, for instance, to help a human being tagging master data, right. Making the construction of your data model easier. So that would be some of the other things we are working on. That might be slightly more abstract, but that we hope to bring closer to the market and really having solving practical issues. Because if you have a large building, or the identification of your master that have all your sensors, that takes a lot of time. So if you can accelerate that…

Patterson: Master data management kind of goes hand in hand with AI.

Coureil: Totally. I knew somebody who told me always, and I really like it, there is not AI as in artificial intelligence without IA as information architecture. And that’s so right.

Patterson: Okay, last question here. Let’s talk about the Cloud, and not the Cloud in the speculative future, let’s talk about how the Cloud and how AI helps companies be more efficient. Let’s talk specifically. We have some Clouds, Azure, we have the Amazon Cloud, we have the Google Cloud. So, how is AI benefiting business now using those public Clouds? And where are we going in the short term?

Coureil: So that’s actually I see, if you will, three levels very, very quickly.