When people think about Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots and autonomous cars often come to mind. But today, AI is also making its way into the enterprise primarily focused on supporting the not-so-sexy, yet game changing business decision making process. The market demand is big and growing:
- Gartner forecasts $2.9 trillion AI opportunities by 2021.
- An Accenture survey projects 85% of business executives plan to invest in AI over the next three years with most of the investments focused on revenue-critical business processes.
- At same time, it is estimated that 80% of available data currently goes unused by businesses to win new customers, improve business relationships and maximize profitability.
In this environment, there is one fundamental question that will play out in the coming year – how will businesses use artificial intelligence to improve processes and increase revenue?
Despite the hype, AI is only as good as the data and training methods used to fine tune it,” advises Praful Saklani, an AI expert and the CEO and Co-Founder of Pramata. “In the consumer space, guided by human input, Facebook’s AI engines work their magic and build tag suggestions not only for the people you know, but the people who know you. You’re training the algorithm when you say ‘yes’ or, even, ‘no” similar to how auto-suggest on Google queries improves with your input.”
In the enterprise, AI combined with a human-in-the-loop, or human-assisted AI, works similarly to extract deep insights from historical business data, enabling companies to make decisions and take actions that accelerate business processes, reduce risk and maximize revenue. For example, the ability to quickly identify contract expiration dates alone — buried inside hundreds of thousands of contracts – can help save between 2-5 percent of revenues.
Many large B2B enterprises such as Century Link, Comcast Business, NCR, McKesson and many others pioneer the use of human-assisted AI in their organizations. As we enter 2018, many enterprise though-leaders are taking the following questions seriously in order to optimize their competitive advantage:
- Which business processes are best suited to take advantage of AI?
- How does AI rely on human assistance to be effective?
- What are the business benefits of using AI?
- What are the first steps businesses must take to implement AI?
- What are the myths about the capabilities AI and big data and their synergy?
Now is the time to more fully define your strategy for engaging AI in the next year to two. Being late to this game can have serious affects on the advancement of your business.
Contributed by Daniel D. Gutierrez, Managing Editor and Resident Data Scientist of insideBIGDATA. In addition to being a tech journalist, Daniel also is a practicing data scientist, author, educator and sits on a number of advisory boards for various start-up companies.
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