Become an AI Company in 90 days

Description

THE ERA OF INTELLIGENT COMPUTING

Congratulations. You’re living through a once-in-a-generation technology shift—the era of artificial intelligence, or AI. Like previous fundamental shifts such as electricity, the computer, or the Internet, AI will change everything. Skeptical about such big claims? I don’t blame you. Over the past few decades we’ve been bombarded by an endless parade of new technologies promising to “disrupt” everything and solve all our problems.

Most of these technologies never yield more than incremental benefits:

• Object-oriented programming made software only slightly more reusable.
• Social media moved us closer to only a fraction of our customers.
• NoSQL databases solved some scalability problems and created many others.

Big data, fuzzy logic, mobile, ontologies, . . . year after year the buzzwords keep coming. And most of them merely come and go.
But how about electricity? The microprocessor? Personal computers? The Internet? Enthusiasts welcomed these technologies with lots of hype, and everyone underestimated their long-term impact. Today no large-scale business can survive without all of them. These fundamental technology shifts created value by:

• Replacing or augmenting labor
  (industrial automation, appliances, robotics)
• Helping us work more efficiently
  (spreadsheets, databases, enterprise software)
• Helping us communicate more efficiently
  (phones, email, web sites)

AI, the current technology shift, creates value in an additional way:
by replacing or augmenting human thinking.
No doubt you’re already seeing examples of AI in consumer products. Facial recognition works almost flawlessly in the iPhone X. Siri and Alexa can interpret and answer simple questions, and voice-to-text on our smartphones improves daily.

But these narrow AI solutions are only the beginning. Soon business processes that involve thousands of interactions between people, and software will be replaced with AI models.