The rise of artificial intelligence in business and society

Artificial intelligence was once a phenomenon restricted to sci-fi movies, but technology has finally caught up with imagination. Now AI has become reality and amazingly, most people encounter some form of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives.

For example, AI has dramatically improved the technology in our homes. Amazon’s Alexa can carry out a number of functions via voice interactions , such as playing music, answering factual questions and even making online purchases. And now, with the recent launch of AmazonGo , AI allows shoppers to simply walk out of a shop with their purchases and automatically get charged, sending an invoice directly to their phone.
To truly understand AI, we must first absorb its definition. According to Gartner there are three key requirements that define AI:

1. It needs to be able to adapt its behaviour based on experience.
2. It can’t be totally dependent on instructions from people and thus, needs to be able to learn on its own.
3. It needs to be able to come up with unanticipated results.

If you are following these requirements the AI that we interact with on a daily basis, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, are defined as ‘weak AI’. This means that they were created by a number of algorithms that have been built to accomplish specific tasks. ‘Strong AI’ and ‘General AI’, that can replicate or even exceed human intelligence, may be the final aim for scientists but have not yet been successfully developed. This type of AI is still confined to existence on the movie screen – for now.

But Weak (or Narrow) AI is still very powerful today. Not only is this AI impacting our homes, but much of the excitement surrounding its development stems from its potential to revolutionise the workplace. Another Gartner report also states that “employing AI offers enterprises the opportunity to give customers an improved experience at every point of interaction, but without human governance, the opportunity will be squandered.” So as AI is implemented into the corporate environment, it will need “human governance” in order to be successful. This responsibility will most likely fall into the hands of corporate IT Service Management (ITSM) teams.

AI’s role in the revolution of ITSM
However, in turn AI also has the potential to transform ITSM into a more user friendly and efficient system. The adoption of AI should in theory allow members of IT to delegate their more mundane daily tasks to AI software and free up their time to pursue more strategic activities. Rather than operating in the background, IT staff would be able to re-position themselves as key business enablers.

We are already seeing AI technology being used in chatbot software, helping to move the task of dealing with customer inquiries and issues away from IT staff. This utilises conversational user interfaces, natural language recognition and learning/pattern recognition.

These conversation-based pattern and intent-learning technologies open the door for AI to be able to converse, learn and interpret an individual’s feelings, thus allowing for a more complex understanding of human behaviour.