AI-assisted Decision Support System

AI(m) to Make the Right Choice

Love it, hate it, there simply is no denying that the age of artificial intelligence (AI) is truly upon us. We may not even realize it, but over the last couple of years, the influence of AI in our lives has steadily increased, inconspicuously becoming a part of our daily lives, right from providing users with timely and automated weather updates, to helping businesses analyse consumer behavioural patterns and accordingly provide the perfect solution, even before the trend gains traction. Till recently, AI has been leveraged to assist humans with repetitive and cumbersome tasks. Rapid advancements in technology though have seen increasing penetration of AI across sectors such as healthcare, finance, commerce, marketing, command and control, and cybersecurity. The true potential of AI is yet to be fully leveraged though, as in its current form all or most part of algorithms governing it are controlled by humans. This is mainly due to the fact that AI solutions do not have a complete grasp of context. A steady paradigm shift though is now underway, wherein AI is being used to help make complex decisions that require sound judgement and a well thought out strategy. AI-assisted decision support systems are emerging as the perfect solution that focuses on augmenting, rather than replacing humans.

Solving complex problems the intelligent way

To best illustrate the need for intelligent decision support systems (IDSS). consider the manufacturing industry value chain. It involves manufacturing manager focused on optimizing production, energy manager focused on reducing power consumption, resource manager focused on achieving the target with the least use of resources, maintenance manager focused on ensuring minimal need for maintenance tasks and finance manager focused on keeping the costs involved to the lowest level possible. Each department has a completely different take on how to go about achieving its specific objective, which may not complement the objective of the other departments involved in the manufacturing process. Human decision making alone cannot suffice in such a scenario, as it may not deploy a holistic approach to address the matter, in turn not attaining optimal productivity, while maintaining the various other aspects involved. AI-assisted decision support systems act as a joint cognitive system that doesn’t just use technology, but collaborates with AI to provide precise decisions to achieve optimal results across the entire value chain.

Such intelligent systems leverage the ability of AI to reason, learn, remember, plan and analyse in order to overcome human limitations and significantly extend capabilities. Such systems simplify the decision making process by accessing extensive data sources to pinpoint relevant information, analysing unstructured data, developing generalized solutions from rule-sets and probabilities, and finding associations in information from multiple sources that may influence a decision. Intelligent decision support systems can ideally achieve the following:

• Constantly learn from interactions and scenarios
• Understand ambiguous or contradictory messages
• Promptly and successfully respond to a new situation
• Solve problems using reasoning
• Resolve perplexing issues
• Understand and infer in ordinary, rational ways
• Manipulate the environment by leveraging knowledge accumulated
• Think and reason
• Ascertain the relative importance of different elements in a situation

These unmatched qualities of such systems have led to a spurt in adoption of intelligent decision support systems in highly critical decision making process such as in industrial process designing, wastewater treatment plant supervision, real-time automatic supervision in intensive care units, and in coordination in emergency situations. These systems are paving the way for a future where, as ironic as it may seem, human intelligence would allow for AI to exceed humans in every field.