BEAST #7

72 #Technology | Artificial Intelligence
#Technology | Artificial Intelligence 73
SUPER-BOOST
YOUR COMPANY
WITH AI IN 4 AREAS BY
FATEH AMROUNE
The overall artificial intelligence market is
expected to be worth between USD 16.06Bn
… and a staggering 153Bn by 2022 [1] . The
difference is so big that any projection or
conclusion is pointless, the complexity to
evaluate the market potential of AI market is
a direct consequence of the broad meaning
of AI. AI is in reality «just» an umbrella term,
or like some say a marketing buzz word, that
include a lot of sub-fields, ranging from the
classic ‘Problem Solving’ to the holy grail of
‘General Intelligence’. Therefore, asking if AI is
good for your business is like asking a doctor if
medicine is good to heal patients, the answer
is «yes» but you won’t get many more details.
In this article, instead of going through a list of technologies and fields that
AI covers, I’ve taken an enterprise-centric approach, and imagined how key
departments could benefit from this new super-power, today and tomorrow.
From Human Resource to Employee Happiness Department
The HR department is crucial in every company, they do the single most
important thing that make all the rest possible, they hire the people to
build the company. Unfortunately, CV mining, office management and other
administrative tasks consume most of their time, neglecting the core and
critical part of their job; choosing the right people to work in the company and
working on their happiness that will lead to performance for the company. The
AI field that will help HR the most are Natural Language Processing and Social
Intelligence and Machine Learning. With these technologies, HR will smartly
automate the identification of ideal candidates, using multiple sources of data
such as internet fingerprint, posted CV, social network density and quality and
social media activity. AI will also predict future employee performance based
on their past performance, company forecast, manager and peers feedback,
personal profiling etc. and take over most of the administrative tasks. AI will
liberate HR from the paper work, and they will be able to re-focus their time
and energy on the Human side of their role.
Companies such as EmployInsight rely heavily on data processing and
machine learning techniques to identify the best applicant.
© Shutterstock - ktsdesign
A Company like Onfido also uses internet and AI to process background
checks more quickly and effectively than ever.
From Customer Service to User Delight Department
If HR own the first interaction with employee, the Customer Service
department owns the other critical first interaction, the one with
customer. Its quality can make or break a company. Therefore, being on
the top of your game can change the destiny of your company. Here,
two fields of AI may generate a decisive advantage; Natural Language
Processing and Social Intelligence. With a market expected to grow
at a CAGR of more than 37% between 2017 and 2021 according
to BusinessWire, Global Chatbot is the flagship of Natural Language
Processing. Chatbots combined with Social Intelligence may disrupt
the customer service for ever. This technology will allow companies
to offer instant and customized responses to any customer on any
device at any time
Chatbot is a bourgeoning space with multiple actors from very big
companies such as Microsoft to startups such as Anboto and Nuance,
two promising companies offering a performant Chatbot dedicated to
Customer Service.
From Marketing to Financial Scenario Department
There’s a famous quote about Marketing stating «the main problem
of marketing campaign is that 50% of their campaign fails, but noone
knows which half». Marketing is both a science and an art,
but it may definitely turn into a science sooner rather than later.
Advanced capabilities such as Machine Learning, Natural Language
Processing, applied statistics among other techniques pave the
way to a new field called the prescriptive analytics. It goes a step
ahead of predictive analytics in the sense that this technology also
suggests the best actions to initiate to take advantage of the future
as perceived. With this technology in hand, a marketer becomes a
man with super-powers, as he will have the power to visualise, make
scenarios and act on the future (only concerning their product sales
and not the lottery…). The principle is quite simple. Sales output
means a direct outcome of millions of inputs (external or internal),
and if you have access to this input, with enough power to process it
and the right algorithm to learn and refine the model, then you can
predict the sales outcome more precisely than ever. An unexpected
outcome might be the merge of finance and marketing functions in
the near future.
«Fateh Amroune is the founder of Kemada, a consulting company
in digital transformation, and co-founder of Singular Intelligence,
an Oxford-based start-up specialized in AI and prescriptive
analytics. Serial entrepreneur with over 18 years of
experience in software industry and an Oxford
graduate in Strategy and Innovation, Fateh is
passionate about the impact of technologies on
businesses.»
Interested in this field? If you just play it safe, you can try IBM
or Nielsen Quick. If you are an investor or an early adopter
have a look at Singular Intelligence for their prescriptive
analytics solution or Talkwalker for their AI powered solution
offering advanced market knowledge.
From Top Management to General Intelligence Management
Does having a robot in your board of director sound like
science fiction? In fact, it has already happened as a
robot called Vital was named director by a Hong Kong
venture capital in 2014. In 2016, Tieto, a Nordic company
also appointed an Artificial Intelligence as a member of
the leadership team. The rise of AI in these two cases is
largely due to the nature of the companies which are heavily
data-driven. The underlying technology for those two AI is
prescriptive analytics. But there’s an even bigger jump that
may happen, the combination of several AI sub-fields such
as prescriptive analytics, NLP, creativity processing, social
intelligence and planning all packaged in one will generate
what we call «general intelligence», an artificial intelligence
able to surpass Humans in all cognitive aspects and able to
understand the human impact of the decision.
General Intelligence technology is mostly studied in universities
such as Cambridge or MIT but there are two noticeable startups
working on a commercially viable General Intelligence
solution: the first is KIMERA with Nigel and the second is
Maluuba which was recently acquired by Microsoft.
Any technology that can reproduce automatically a human
reasoning is by definition Artificial Intelligence in that sense AI
can be dated back to the mid-1600 and the first calculating
machine. That is why AI is a moving target, what we’ve called
today AI will be just simple technology tomorrow. That is
also why AI will remain a greenfield world with millions of
possibilities but we should not be blurred by the buzzword
and trends, we should put the technology aside, think value
proposition and reframe our ambition. As a rule of thumb, use
the value 10, and force yourself to ask over ambition goals:
how can I divide my costs by 10? How can I build this product
10 times faster? How I can multiply my sales by 10? This
way of thinking will force the company to put aside the old
processes leading to incremental progress and think about
disruptive innovation (at organisation,
business and technology levels).
Only then you can start thinking
about how AI, or any other
technology, can help you.
BEAST MAGAZINE #7
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Sources: marketsandmarkets.com and techemergence.com - 31/03/1