Software vendors including Google, Microsoft and Salesforce are incorporating Artificial Intelligence in their products. How will companies use it?
Talk about artificial intelligence, and most people think about machines that can Reason. In a business context that would mean clever AIs that could use their powerful intellects to become formidable business leaders that could outwit mere humans.
But since the late 1980s, those working in the field of artificial intelligence have shifted away from reasoning because it turned out to be far harder than people had anticipated. IBM's Watson notwithstanding, the focus has been more on machine learning and pattern recognition -- activities which, like reasoning, also take place in the human brain.
Pattern recognition is what enables people -- and artificial intelligences -- to understand that a photo and a different line drawing may both be representations of, say, a cat.
Huge advances in software-based pattern recognition have taken place over the last 20 years, allowing computers to recognize patterns in data, images, words and phrases. "Machines are good at sorting things into buckets using machine learning but planning, formulating hypotheses and proofs? That has proved much harder," explained Nova Spivak, a technology futurist and serial entrepreneur. "Reasoning is different. Very little progress has been made on that front."
One possible explanation for the advance in pattern recognition capabilities is that the processing power available to carry it out has become much cheaper. Low cost graphics processing units (GPUs) that can do many processing tasks simultaneously are ideal for pattern recognition work. Between 2008 and 2016, there was a million-fold increase in GPU power, according to analyst firm Gartner.
There is little doubt that machine learning and pattern recognition-based artificial intelligence is ready to be employed by businesses in a big way. Professional services firm Deloitte Global predicts that over 80 percent of the largest enterprise software companies will integrate AI functionality into their products by the end of the year; by 2020 it expects 95 percent of the top 100 enterprise software companies to have done so.
An important question to ask, then, is how can AI capabilities help businesses, and in which fields will they be most useful?
According to Tony Williams, principal at legal management consultancy Jomati Consultants, professional services are particularly ripe candidates for the application of this type of artificial intelligence because they rely on large amounts of data and information and "a relatively small amount of judgment."
What's key here is that a relatively simple process has to be applied to a large amount of data. Often these tasks are tedious for humans, but artificial intelligences can do them very quickly. There won't be any human flair or creativity, but the job will be done properly and quickly.
The result is that businesses will be more productive, with AI handling the unglamorous work, ensuring that "processes get applied, stuff is accurate, errors are eliminated, and compliance is met," according to Dr Stuart Anderson, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
Something like this has already occurred in the field of journalism, with the Associated Press (AP) employing software that uses artificial intelligence to automatically write earnings reports and minor-league sports stories. AP previously used real journalists to write about 300 earnings reports per quarter, but the smart software now generates 10 times that number of reports, freeing up journalists from what is essentially a data processing task to engage in much higher level and more interesting reporting.
And at Sweden-based furniture company Ikea, an AI helps process employment contracts.
