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AI: inside and out The ability to harness AI disruption at the core and edge of your business is critical to your future, write Mohit Garg and Kate Sweetman
We recently finished an offsite with the leaders of a US-based company doing business in almost 100 countries around the globe. Their industry is not a digital leader, and neither is their firm. The sense of unease on the topic of AI and the digital world was palpable. Here are the worries that we heard: Do we risk being eclipsed by competitors who understand AI’s possibilities better than we do? Can competitors adapt more effectively to the digital revolution than we can? Where are the points of leverage in our business? Where do we begin?
Deploying AI technologies: now and near term
Highly sophisticated AI applications may move from the labs to mainstream over the next decade. In the short term, the lowest hanging AI fruit is going to be picked in roles where the intelligence of a two-year-old child is adequate, in order to reduce costs, automate repetitive errorprone activities or replace humans in hazardous Dialogue Q3 2018
environments. In other cases, AI is being applied with highly sophisticated models that require years of training and R&D. These models far exceed the capabilities of the smartest human, but only for focused specific tasks. Here are a few examples:
Biotech Breakthroughs here require labouring through a sequence of options. A machine learning toolbox built into the experimental setup can look at experiment results and algorithmically decide which experiment to do next, and even deduce the general outcome of a series of experiments.
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AI is gathering steam, and it’s the right time to confess your ignorance and start asking these questions. Many companies have already supplemented their operations with virtual assistants that compose eerily human emails to schedule meetings. On a more strategic level, the recommendation engines that have helped propel Netflix and Amazon to the peaks of capitalist glory are becoming available to existing firms. What do you need to know? And what opportunities does AI offer you? We have scoped the current and near-future state of AI, and offer our findings to non-technical leaders and managers to develop the confidence to move forward. The essential finding: even in these early days of AI, your business should be looking for opportunities at the core and at the edge.