What’s the problem with AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) was first coined by American computer scientist Prof. John McCarthy in 1955, he said, ‘Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.’??In the 66 years since, AI has only come into its own in the past decade when the technology has caught up with the theory. In 2016, Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Google, IBM and Microsoft formed the ‘Partnership of AI’ to set societal and ethical best practices for artificial intelligence research. So, where is AI today?

What is AI in the 20s?

IBM’s definition of AI is, ‘Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.’?The reality, widely accepted, is that true AI doesn’t exist in business yet. What does exist are AI applications, which learn from interactions and make recommendation-based responses based on those learnings, namely;

• speech recognition, (such as Siri, Alexa),
• virtual agents, (Slack, FB messenger),
• recommendation engines,
• and self-driving tech.

The uptake of these applications* has grown during the pandemic as people were forced to become more connected during the lockdown.

AI has made inroads into enterprise technology, streamlining workflows etc., and while there is big ambition on the adoption of AI, the reality is its uptake among global companies is not where it should be according to Forbes Insights. A KPMG report (2020) suggests that there is an AI 'trust gap', which has ‘prevailed amid a lack of quality data and an ensuing reluctance to hand critical business decisions over to machines’. This lack of data is perceived as a barrier to adoption. Similarly, the 2021 McKinsey AI report, suggests that its?‘findings show no increase in AI adoption’.

What’s the problem with AI?

As a branding agency working in the technology sector, we have seen many AI-driven propositions in our time, some interesting and cool stuff that isn’t accelerating as fast as perhaps it should. It seems to us overall that AI has a bit of a positioning problem in the following three areas:

1. Language – exclusive and not very clear.
2. Perception – fear and distrust.
3. Clarity – what is the problem being solved?

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