The Future Of Sales Is In Artificial Intelligence, According To This CEO

“Automation” is the golden word in business.

The more you can automate, the faster you can move, the bigger you can grow, the more efficiently you can run, and the more effectively you can communicate. Without automation, you’re left doing everything by hand, manually operating every aspect of the business–from A to Z.

But automation is really only the tip of the iceberg. The whole idea behind automation is being able to take pre-determined sequences and repeat them over and over again–a rear-view mirror approach, if you will. The next step, however, requires some element of artificial intelligence and machine learning, wherein past behavior can influence future steps.

In short: AI can take it upon itself to do the next thing, without you needing to tell it to do so.

I was recently reading through this viral story about how Facebook had to shut down two of the bots it was developing, when it realized these AI agents had developed a language of their own. As FastCompany summarized, bots are programmed to find the fastest, most effective way to get from point A to B, based on a specific goal or reward. Over time, these bots “learned” that English was not the most efficient means of communication, and slowly started developing their own language to achieve their pre-programmed goal.

Obviously, this story rampaged all over the Internet, yielding declarations from the masses, “I, Robot is here. Run for your life.”

I tend to be fairly optimistic about the future of technology, so I chalked this tiny misstep up to trial-and-error learning. But it got me thinking about how AI will continue to evolve, and the business applications it will soon bring to various industries.

I was chatting about this with Greg Pietruszynski, CEO and co-founder of Growbots, a machine-learning sales tool. We were talking about some of the unsolved-for challenges in AI and machine-learning right now, and seeing as Growbots just raised another $2.5 million, putting their total funding at $4.2 million, these are opportunities he is very aware of.

“I think the challenges with AI have 2 layers: the data you use for training your algorithms–and the algorithms themselves. Without the relevant training data, all of the algorithms are useless. AI researchers say that getting data is 90% effort and 10% building algorithms. Many people wonder why Tesla was the first company to introduce the autopilot feature to their cars, and the answer is quite simple: they’ve been collecting data from all of their cars on the road, while Google has only been collecting data from a few prototypes,” said Pietruszynski.

This is the same mindset Growbots has applied to their own AI capabilities, learning from customers’ actions to improve upon targeting algorithms.