Today's Tech Digest

AI and machine learning are forcing CIOs to rethink IT strategies

Machine learning can be the IT pro’s best friend; they just need to realize how it can be used to make their jobs easier." This makes sense because the use of machine learning will be a “crawl-walk-run” for most organizations, as they will apply it in phases. The first phase will be using it to describe something. It analyzes the data and helps interpret it. The next phase is more cognitive where the AI can start to solve problems. The third phase will see the technology start to predict things. For example, it could perhaps predict that a security breach is going to occur based on other data. The last phase, and we are years away from this, is prescriptive where the AI is able to predict things and then take action to remediate the action. In the previous example, it could not only predict a breach, but it could then take the necessary steps to ensure it doesn’t happen. For this to occur, the AI would use itself in an iterative manner.

Machine learning & language complexity: why chatbots can’t talk… yet

Most of the value of deep learning today is in narrow domains where you can get a lot of data. Here’s one example of something it cannot do: have a meaningful conversation. There are demos, and if you cherry-pick the conversation, it looks like it’s having a meaningful conversation, but if you actually try it yourself, it quickly goes off the rails. In fact, anything that’s a bit too much open domain is beyond what we can currently do. Instead, in the meantime, we can use these systems to assist human workers who then offer and correct their responses. That’s much more feasible. When they interact with others, people tend to express the same intent with different words, potentially over several sentences with different word orders. Talking to chatbots can sometimes be challenging — current chatbot solutions don’t allow diversity. Therefore, you’d better format your dialogue in order to be understood. This is frustrating.

The Cold Start Problem with AI

Any company either startup or enterprise, who wants to take advantage of AI, needs to ensure that they have actual useful data to start with. Where some companies might suffice with simple log data that is generated by their application or website, a company that wants to be able to use AI to enhance their business/products/services, should ensure that the data that they are collecting is the right type of data. Dependent on the industry and business you are in, the right type of data can be log data, transactional data, either numerical or categorical, it is up to the person working with the data to decide what that needs to be. Besides collecting the right data, another big step is ensuring that the data that you work with is correct. Meaning that the data is an actual representative of what happened. If I want a count of all the Payment Transactions, I need to know what is the definition of a Transaction, is it an Initiated Transaction or a Processed Transaction? Once I have answered that question and ensured that the organization agrees on it, can I use it to work with.

How Blockchain Will Change the Sharing Economy

Think of how the sharing economy has exploded in the past decade. If you’ve taken an Uber to the airport or rented an Airbnb, you’ve been a part of it. We’re even at a point where renting out personal items is a viable business model. For example, Omni Storage stores items you’re not using — just like a normal storage company — but they also rent your items out to people. Skis, guitar, winter jacket. It’s all available for rent (with the owner’s permission) via an app. We all hold onto certain possessions, because we plan to use them eventually. Or so we tell ourselves. Why not make some money off of our stuff instead of letting it go unused? That question is at the heart of the sharing economy, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more about businesses like Omni in the next few years. This is what it can look like if blockchain is involved. Futuristic sharing concepts will only work if many other considerations are taken care of. Each item has to be documented, proven authentic, assigned a current value, and even insured. And blockchain can be extremely useful here.

Will artificial intelligence make you a better leader?

In our experience, AI can be a huge help to the leader who’s trying to become more inwardly agile and foster creative approaches to transformation. When a CEO puts AI to work on the toughest and most complex strategic challenges, he or she must rely on the same set of practices that build personal inner agility. Sending AI out into the mass of complexity, without knowing in advance what it will come back with, the CEO is embracing the discovery of original, unexpected, and breakthrough ideas. This is a way to test and finally move on from long-held beliefs and prejudices about their organization, and to radically reframe the questions in order to find entirely new kinds of solutions. And the best thing about AI solutions is that they can be tested. AI creates its own empirical feedback loop that allows you to think of your company as an experimental science lab for transformation and performance improvement. In other words, the hard science of AI can be just what you need to ask the kind of broad questions that lay the foundation for meaningful progress.

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