How Is Artificial Intelligence Developing In The Enterprise?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from science fiction into the enterprise in recent years. Many companies are using AI systems today to intelligently analyse large volumes of changing data and to notice or predict patterns. Typical business uses today include examples such as:

• Rail operators predicting train delays before they happen because the AI system can extrapolate from small delays to predict the impact on the entire network.
• Customer service agents being advised on how to help customers by systems that know the answer to every question a customer has asked in the past.
• Alexa knows how to answer your question because it immediately processes your voice and determines what you are asking before creating an answer.
• Netflix knows which movie you might want to watch because they know your past behaviour and how similar customers have also behaved.

AI really is all around us today, in the enterprise and as consumers of services. In the present environment it would now be unusual for any company to not be exploring how AI can improve their business.

But AI does have one a fundamental flaw, it is always limited to working on a very specific problem. This means that you can have a very complex system that knows everything that your customer may ask when they call for help or the system may understand how to play chess or Go, but these individual tasks are all that it can do. There is no inherent awareness of the environment around the system – although we use the term intelligence, it’s not really aware or sentient. An AI system that can play Go cannot plan the best route on a map.

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Photo by Matthew Hurst licensed under Creative Commons.