Artificial Intelligence and Your Business

What You Can—and Cannot—Expect AI to Do for Your Company

Artificial intelligence—machine learning—deep learning…it seems that hardly a day goes by without reports of a new advance toward man-made devices that think independently. Whether it’s new feats by Alexa, Watson and Google Assistant, the “musical DNA” of Pandora that seems to know that you’ll like a song, or John Paul providing concierge services around the world, it’s a technology that promises a new world. But is it right for your business? Should you be considering a significant investment in AI? Will it be money well spent? Let’s understand what AI is, what it’s currently capable of doing, and what is likely unreasonable to expect from an investment in artificial intelligence.

Defining Our Terms

The terms “artificial intelligence (AI)” and “machine learning” get bandied about whenever the topic of conversation turns to Big Data or to the future of technology as a whole. As a general rule, AI speaks to a general idea where machines/devices have the capability to perform functions or jobs that fall under the rubric “smart,” where the machine has the ability to operate somewhat autonomously and interactively. The term “machine learning”—first coined in 1959 –typically refers to an AI application based on the premise that we make data available to machines and let them learn on their own. Deep learning represents a subset of machine learning, where machines go beyond task-specific algorithms and engage in learning that may be partially supervised or completely unsupervised.

Before You Dive In—A Couple Caveats

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Before committing to a specific approach to the incorporation of AI into your business, you need to be cognizant of a couple of factors:

• AI is developing at different rates of speed for different applications—Industry insiders refer to this as “AI maturity.” Before you investigate the maturity of the artificial intelligence applicable to your business, though, you want to take a close look at your business to see where AI has the most significant potential benefit. Often, that’s the component of your business that has the most upside potential, where you’ll have the anticipated revenue to offset costs of R&D, but also where you have access to substantial amounts of data.

The obvious question—how do you determine the maturity of the AI that would benefit your business? Start by examining the applications that have evolved from known AI startups, such as Venture Scanner.

• AI requires a huge amount of data—Data is the fuel that powers AI. Your data will need to be pretty clean, too, to make AI functional. If you don’t have the data, you won’t be able to apply AI solutions…simple as that.

Realistic Expectations for Artificial Intelligence

Here are some of the ways that you can reasonably expect to use AI and machine learning to provide significant benefit to businesses:

• Improved communication in the workplace—With the concept of AI personalization, each employee will have a “smart” virtual assistant, which can handle all routine and repeated tasks, help employees monitor goals and production, and make recommendations to improve efficiency
• AI-powered chatbots—A chatbot maintains an ongoing “conversation” with an electronic device, gathering and storing data, so that individual users don’t have to. The effective use of chatbots can dramatically affect the time it takes to collect data and streamline work for business analysts.
• Human resource management—With AI, many of the functions of an HR department can be automated, allowing human resources employees to focus their efforts on finding the best employees and working with existing employees.
• Logistics and supply chains—AI will have a significant impact on most aspects of business logistics and delivery of goods. First, AI offers the opportunity to proactively determine customer needs. In addition, delivery can be turned over to autonomous trucks, robotic sorting and picking systems. Many industry insiders believe that AI has the potential to eliminate the concept of “business hours,” allowing goods to be delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What AI Can’t Do for You

Though we already discussed it above, it bears repeating—AI doesn’t offer much promise for business components that don’t have substantial data sets. That’s not to say that you can’t start by building your data collection system, but that can be a lengthy and expensive process. Accordingly, if there’s little or no data related to some aspect of your business, forget about incorporating AI, machine learning or deep learning to improve the process or benefit your business.

Introducing AI to Your Business

While ignoring AI is almost certainly a bad business decision, you need to be judicious as you move forward. If you’re lucky enough to have high level AI talent in-house, there are a number of AI engines with which you can experiment, such as Google’s TensorFlow and Veritone. However, if you don’t have skilled AI people on board, it’s a significant risk to try to hire and build an AI department. AI is still in its infancy, so the talent can be hard to find and will cost you a fortune.

Luckily, there’s another option—work with vendors who have already embedded AI into their products. Embedded AI, in products such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine, can save substantial time, money and effort. There are AI embedded platforms for sales forecasting, financial modeling and other industry specific solutions.

With any investment in AI, though, you’ll need to be prepared for starts and stops, for projects that take a long time to come to fruition, and for encountering a number of rabbit holes. Accordingly, you need to be clear about your expectations, setting realistic goals, budgets and timelines.