AI everywhere !! where is the ‘Work Knowledge Graph’?

Algorithmic economy, Genomic Medicine, Digital Farming, E-Governance, Blockchain Ledger, Driverless Transport etc. interfaced through a ‘Human like digital assistant’ will change the way we live and work for ever. The ‘AI everywhere’ will perhaps see the last version of human species as per Yuval Harari’s very interesting book Homo Deus.

The world is a ‘giant computer’ :Thanks to cloud computing, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, we should start to think of the planet as one giant computer, according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella.

"Digital technology, pervasively, is getting embedded in every place: everything, every person, every walk of life is being fundamentally shaped by digital technology -- it is happening in our homes, our work, our places of entertainment," said Nadella speaking in London. "It's amazing to think of a world as a computer. I think that's the right metaphor for us as we go forward."

My household produced, ? terabyte of data last quarter and that is exponentially growing. The only way I can find, reason through and make any meaningful decision through the clutter of my household ‘ data’ is by moving from Apps to devices to filing cabinets. The issues are something more fundamental here, “It is really difficult to make all the technology share and connect to each other”.

The work is also a ‘Giant Computer’!

The enterprise S/W market is touching 500b globally. And additional services industry accounts to 3 times more than that. The 4 trillion $ opportunity, 30 billion devices!! Wow... this is certainly turning to be a huge computing eco system.

Here is the issue: Enterprise to Small business, every organisation continues to struggle with silo of application and data, and possibly the biggest productivity loss for any organisation, accounts to “Finding and connecting the right opportunity and issues to correct solution”.

From supply chain, finance, HR, CRM, Collaboration, Marketing to core business function applications, all have their little ponds of ‘Data’. The plumbing is very difficult as even in 2018, we continue to build the core S/W without a common global standard. Each vendor continues to differentiate by creating their ‘walled garden’. In fact, within their own portfolio of products, information wont flow easily. Businesses continue to suffer 30+ percentage of productivity loss due to digitization done in silo.

The ‘Work Graph’ – The foundation for AI within enterprise

If we want to be customer obsessed to solve the issues of information silos, there needs to be a ‘Work graph’. We had ‘Interest graph’, ‘Social graph’ and the ‘Search graph’, but we don’t have any easy way to build a ‘Work graph’. Mainly because of disjoint echo system of legacy and new systems, and lack of data exposure to build a knowledge graph within the work environment.

This can be addressed without recreating everything that is legacy, by creating a very robust search and graph infrastructure, while the data is Private to individual businesses. It’s not one monolithic system but a series of graphs — you can bring the whole business together, but then you have to negotiate with lots of data owners.

By combining external graphs like LinkedIn Graph for employees and Microsoft office graph for the collaboration , conversation, task management and Sales-force/Dynamic CRM graphs along with ‘Enterprise wide Graph’ : internal  graphs that can be built using great NoSQL solutions like neo4j, Solr, Elasticsearch (ELK), Crate, Splunk, Swiftype, Algolia, SearchSpring etc.  You can take a SAAS product subscription e.g. Elastic cloud, you have choice of hosting it yourself too.

Pic : From Neo4j

“Let’s now double-click on the world of graphs. In 2020, I believe graphs will be a standard part of an enterprise’s infrastructure. Because graph-based applications will pervade entire organizations, Neo4j will be considered a default or standard much like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server is for enterprises today”. Emil Efrem, CEO & Co-Founder, Neo4j, Inc.

A combination of governance, platform investment; Enterprise to SMB, each ‘digital edge’ can be self-contained knowledge graph that is learning all the time, but importantly interacting the web of other cloud and edge ‘knowledge graphs’ thus feeding a giant connected graph which then can help ‘AI Everywhere’ revolution.  

And to make sense of this “WORLD AS A COMPUTER”, we need AI everywhere that is interacting and negotiating to complete  tasks.

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Disclaimer: This article is entirely Priti Padhy’s (author) personal view of the current technology trends and world view and has no association with his current or pervious customer, employer, or partner as such. There are references to technology company and products from #Microsoft, #Linkedin, #Elasticsearch, #Neo4j, #Solr,#Elasticsearch, #Crate,#Splunk, #Swittype, #Algolia, #SearchSpring etc. #Digital transformation, #NoSql, #Database, #Search, #Graph, #Knowledgegraph, #AI, #BI, #Datamanagement etc. they are only for information sharing purpose.