WHY A.I?!?

I wanted to adress something regarding all the attention Stena Line and the awesome teams have gotten lately in the media. It is our bold statement to be the worlds first cognitive ferry operator!

As Head of Digital Innovation I have been in the press a lot and I have been getting questions about the tool we are using, which is in this case happen to be artificial intelligence (a set of machine learning techniques). What not many seem to undertand is that it is just that, a tool. The questions should not be about the tool. The question should be Why? Why A.I?

We use A.I because we want to automate everything and anything that can be automated (which in many cases machines can do better anyway) so that we can focus on what matters most, the experience.

Imagine this, let's say that you are looking to buy a new car. It comes down to two cars, lets say a BMW and a Volvo. Do you ask the salesperson about the robots they use in the factory that builds the car? Or do you sit in the car and experience it and base your decision on the total experience with the product?

We have a similar situation in many of our terminals. We have head to head competition. Two lines in the same terminal, our competitor on the right and our own line on the left. How do we get people to use our services and products? Do we tell them that we use deep learning in our HR processes? Or that we have the latest patches installed?

I am ready to claim (and I am happy to be proven wrong) that not one single person will go over to your side with those kind of arguments. The ONLY thing, THE ONLY THING that will make your customer chose you is the experience, nothing else! Regardless what business or industry your are in. Even more important, you are competing with experiences across industries. If a customer has a great experience, in for instance, the NETFLIX app, then they expect the same experience in your app. It doesn't matter that NETFLIX is in the media streaming industry and we are in the transport industry. They don't care about that. They just think "it's easy in this app, then it should be the same experience in that app". The apps are next to each other on their phone.

We are not only talking about the business to consumer experience. The same is true for business to business or even machine to machine experience. Even when we design our APIs, we must think about how this API is experienced and consumed by other systems and developers.

I am not saying that everything else is not important. It is! But it is not what will make your customers (businesses and machines) chose you.

So if you want to embark on digitalisation and use A.I. Ask your self, what is the purpose?