It seems businesses these days are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to finally make bank from big data — and this hasn’t escaped the notice of software vendors. They’re stamping AI on new products with such repetitive thuds, one can easily guess the puff inside the packaging. Knowing what AI can and can’t do could help companies shop wisely for technology that delivers on its promise.
“Cognitive organizations are not going to happen tomorrow morning,” said Tripp Braden (pictured, third from left), executive coach and growth strategist at Strategic Performance Partners. A cognitive business would be fully data and AI-driven across all departments; even companies on the cutting edge are several years out from becoming one, he added.
Braden broke down the state of business data analytics and AI during a panel discussion at the recent IBM Chief Data Officer Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. He spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.) The panel also included Mike Tamir (pictured, second from left), chief data science officer at Takt Inc.; Bob Hayes (pictured, right), president of Business Over Broadway; and Christopher Penn (pictured, left), vice president of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications LLC.
Between now and the arrival of the bona fide cognitive business, there are kinks companies must massage out of their workplace cultures. Artificial intelligence will not make the brains in employees’ skulls unnecessary, according to the panel.
While machine learning capabilities are getting sharper, AI in 2017 is not yet what sci-fi film director Steven Spielberg had in mind. “It’s not robots and Cylons and that sort of thing that are going to be able to think intelligently,” Tamir said.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing administered an intelligence test to Apple Inc.’s Siri, as well as AI assistants from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. How did the state-of-the-art systems fare? The best of them — Google Assistant — scored lower than the average human six-year-old.
This doesn’t prove these systems are terribly deficient at doing what users expect them to, according to Tamir. It simply shows how liberal the use of AI has become in marketing products of dubious deserving. “These are not actually artificial intelligences. These are just tools that apply machine learning strategically,” he said.
The AI washing doesn’t end with consumer tech. “Nearly every technology provider is now claiming to be an AI company,” Gartner Inc. analyst Jim Hare wrote last July in a report titled “How Enterprise Software Providers Should (and Should Not) Exploit the AI Disruption.” More than 1,000 vendors are now selling AI in some form, according to Hare. “Most vendors are overselling the AI capabilities of their products with shiny, bold marketing when their technology provides strictly rule-based machine learning and analytics (rather than anything remotely self-learning),” he wrote.
More advanced machine learning — the mechanics underneath most AI labels — delivers solid, profitable insights, according to Hayes.
