When AI doesn't matter

I've spent the last four years at Google talking to over 300 CEOs and their teams about the wonder of machines that learn. Together we've seen all sorts of fascinating projects and ideas, from self-driving oil rigs in the North Sea staffed by robots, to AI that helps diagnose diabetic retinopathy, to AI re-imagining the patient-doctor interaction during Covid. People always ask me, so, where's the money? Where can AI help my business?

My answer? When AI doesn't matter.

Here's what I mean by that. I've found that a suite of AI techniques can be applied to an onerous, laborious problem in business. For example, take the customer service call. When chatbots first came out I was a real skeptic. But I was missing the point!

A powerful cocktail of AI - reinforcement learning, machine vision, NLP, tensors, intents, semantic graphs, and good ol' fashioned rule based reasoning - easily handle the mundane. "What's my password?" "When can I get the covid vaccine?" "Where's my delivery?" Simple questions clog corporate call centers and cost the world billions, not to mention frustration.

With AI, we can successfully handle these calls for a fraction of the price, then track that the caller doesn't return in 24 hours with the same question, a tight quality assurance process. Companies gladly pay less for peace of mind, freeing up associates for more valuable interactions. Less cost, higher quality, better business. Free people to do their best work. Properly deployed, I've seen leading customers cut a process cost in half. Of course, your mileage may vary.

When something gives you 10x performance or cuts a process cost in half, the CFO doesn't really care that it's AI. It could be hamsters, for all she cares. Those economics are insanely powerful.

You'll read about TAAS - transportation as a service -- where autonomous, electric vehicles echo these economic returns. I'm also seeing it in processing business documents, which many of us do all day.

So if you really want to deploy AI in business, look for opportunities where, frankly, the AI doesn't matter. AI enables truly powerful economics. Free your people to work on more valuable interactions, building better relationships inside and outside your company.