How Artificial Intelligence is set to disrupt Professional Services

According to the futurologist Peter Diamandis (voted one of "The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” in 2014 by Fortune Magazine), Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the "most important technology we're developing this decade ... It's a massive opportunity for humanity, not a threat."

So what exactly is Artificial Intelligence? 

According to Wikipedia, artificial intelligence is the academic field of study which studies how to create computers and computer software that are capable of intelligent behavior.  

Says Diamandis: "Broadly, AI is the ability of a computer to understand your question, to search its vast memory banks, and to give you the best, most accurate, answer. AI is the ability of a computer to process a vast amount of information for you, make decisions, and take (and/or advise you to take) appropriate action."

You may know early versions of AI as Siri on your iPhone, or IBM's Watson supercomputer. Watson made headlines back in 2011 by winning Jeopardy, and now it is helping doctors treat cancer patients by processing massive amounts of clinical data and cross-referencing thousands of individual cases and medical outcomes. But these are the early, "weak" versions of AI. According to Diamandis, what is coming this next decade will be more like JARVIS from the movie Iron Man.

In case you have not watched Iron Man yet, J.A.R.V.I.S. stands for 'Just A Rather Very Intelligent System', and is a highly advanced computerized A.I. developed by Tony Stark, to manage almost everything, especially matters related to technology, in Tony's life. 

Why AI is a Massive Opportunity

According to Diamandis, AI will level the global playing field: "Today, Google's search engine gives a teenager with a smartphone in Mumbai and a billionaire in Manhattan equal access to the world's information." In the future, AI will democratize the ability for everyone to have equal access to services ranging from healthcare to finance advice.

• AI will be your Physician
• AI will be your Financial Advisor
• AI will be your Teacher (and that of your Children)
• AI will be your Fashion Designer
• AI will be your chef AI will be your Entertainer

And likely it will do all of these things for free, or nearly for free, independent of who you are or where you live. Says Diamandis: "Ultimately, AIs will dematerialize, demonetize and democratize all of these services, dramatically improving the quality of life for 8 billion people, pushing us closer towards a world of abundance."

Why Professional Services are Exposed the Most

It is not hard to understand why Professional Services Executives around the world are terrified by the prospect of Artificial Intelligence making its way into the hands of ordinary citizens. No longer will the knowledge about where best to invest, how to handle a legal case and which IT system would be the perfect fit for your firm, be the domain of accredited professionals but AI will be able to empower anybody with research and data that far outweigh any advice a professional adviser could provide today. 

Already, services such as graphic design, web site development and even software have been commoditized to such a degree that thousands of professionals in these fields are offering their services at sites like www.fiverr.com, literally for a handful of dollars. 

Will the Machines take over in 2020? 

Anybody who has watched the third installment to The Terminator, termed 'The Rise of the Machines', will vividly remember the specter of the machines taking over the world - and ultimately replacing the human being. 

According to Diamandis, this scenario is rather far fetched and not justified based on our recent experiences with Artificial Intelligence: "First of all, we (humans) consistently overreact to new technologies. Our default, evolutionary response to new things that we don't understand is to fear the worst.

Nowadays, the fear is promulgated by a flood of dystopian Hollywood movies and negative news that keeps us in fear of the future.In the 1980's, when DNA restriction enzymes were discovered, making genetic engineering possible, the fear mongers warned the world of devastating killer engineered viruses and mutated life forms.

What we got was miracle drugs, and extraordinary increases in food production. Rather than extensive government regulations, a group of biologists, physicians, even lawyers came together at the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA to discuss the potential biohazards and regulation of biotechnology and to draw up voluntary guidelines to ensure the safety of recombinant DNA technology. The guidelines they came up with allowed the researchers to move forward safely and continue to innovate, and we've been using them for 30 years."

The Benefits Outweigh the Risks - by FAR

That being said, Diamandis does acknowledge that strong AI (versus narrow or weak AI) is different – it is perhaps the most important and profound technological development humanity will ever make. (Note: Strong AI is a thinking machine closer to human or superhuman thought, versus Narrow AI, which is more like Siri or Google search engine).

As Ray Kurzweil has argued,  the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks and dangers: "The main reason I believe that AI will be beneficial is that it will be decentralized and widely distributed as it is today. It is not in the hands of one person or one organization or a few but rather in over a billion hands and will become even more ubiquitous as we go into the future. We are all going to enhance ourselves with AI. The world is getting exponentially more peaceful as documented by Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature."

A Tool, Not a Threat (if handled with CARE)

AI will be an incredibly powerful tool that we can use to expand our capabilities and access to resources. Kevin Kelley describes it as an "opportunity to elevate and sharpen our own ethics and morality and ambition."

He goes on, "We'll quickly find that trying to train AIs to be more humanistic will challenge us to be more humanistic. In the way that children can better their parents, the challenge of rearing AIs is an opportunity – not a horror. We should welcome it."

In short, humanity will ultimately collaborate and co-evolve with AI. In fact, at the XPRIZE, Diamandis is currently working on designing an "AI-Human Collaboration XPRIZE" with the folks at TED: "When we talk about all of the problems we have on Earth, and the need to solve them, it is only through such AI-human collaboration that we will gain the ability to solve our grandest challenges and truly create a world of Abundance."

What Can You Do Today? 

Rather than replicating the frog in the boiling water and waiting until it is too late, professional services should take a leaf from the book of the world's most profitable brand, Apple Computer, and especially its legendary founder, Steve Jobs, who was not only a visionary but also wielding an incredible amount of empathy that allowed him to see opportunity where machines would have disregarded such. 

In her ground breaking book 'Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing", the innovation guru Bernadette Jiwa relates how empathy helped Steve Jobs change the world of computing, literally: "During the ’70s a small team of some of the world’s best computer engineers was working in Silicon Valley at PARC, Xerox’s research and innovation division. Their task was to take the company’s vision for the office of the future and make it a reality. Everyone who was anyone in the Valley knew that Xerox was at the leading edge of what the future would look like. These engineers were working on a bunch of things, one of which was improving upon a pointing device that was designed to be used with a computer - a pointing device that we now know as the mouse. The idea wasn’t new and it hadn’t been hatched by the team at PARC; the first prototype of the mouse, invented by Doug Engelbart, had actually been around since the ’60s.

On a rare occasion in 1979, when a select group of visitors was invited to see what the PARC team was working on, scientist Larry Tesler demonstrated how a computer with icons on the screen could be controlled by this pointing device. It just so happened that one of the visitors that day was Steve Jobs. The story goes that as soon as he saw what would become the modern-day mouse in action, Jobs began pacing the room excitedly, and when he finally couldn’t contain himself any longer, he said, ‘you’re sitting on a gold mine’. And ‘this is insanely great’. For the life of him, Steve Jobs couldn’t understand why Xerox wasn’t doing anything with this invention.

While the PARC team focused on developing the product they thought the mouse would eventually become - a $300 accessory built as part of a costly business computer - Steve Jobs had other ideas. A day or two after his visit to Xerox, Jobs met with design consultant Dean Hovey and told him to forget about everything else he was working on for Apple. Jobs knew exactly what they must do next."

The design brief he gave Hovey for the mouse was simple. There were just four criteria:

1. It had to be built for less than $15.
2. It had to last for two years.
3. It needed to work on a typical desktop of Formica or metal.
4. And it had to work on Jobs’ Levi’s.

In one stroke of genius, Jobs had flipped the traditional product development model on its head. Instead of thinking about the features and function of the product in isolation, Jobs made a leap to consider what the product might mean to potential customers. 

When the Apple Macintosh was launched in January 1984, it was the first mass-market personal computer to feature a graphical user interface and a mouse. And that changed everything.

How are you going to apply empathy in the new AI Age? And how close are you to your customer to really understand what it is that matters the most to them?