We often hear some companies jumping on the AI bandwagon and we’re supposed to get all excited at the prospects to follow. Here below is an interesting article in relation to AI and its state of play. It will take time and possibly the global businesses that have the infrastructure and investments to carry it through. Excerpts from MIT Review Despite what you might hear about AI sweeping the world, people in a wide range of industries say the technology is tricky to deploy. It can be costly. And the initial payoff is often modest.
It’s one thing to see breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that can outplay grandmasters of Go, or even to have devices that turn on music at your command. It’s another thing to use AI to make more than incremental changes in businesses that aren’t inherently digital.
AI might eventually transform the economy—by making new products and new business models possible, by predicting things humans couldn’t have foreseen, and by relieving employees of drudgery. But that could take longer than hoped or feared, depending on where you sit. Most companies aren’t generating substantially more output from the hours their employees are putting in. Such productivity gains are largest at the biggest and richest companies, which can afford to spend heavily on the talent and technology infrastructure necessary to make AI work well. This doesn’t necessarily mean that AI is overhyped. It’s just that when it comes to reshaping how business gets done, pattern-recognition algorithms are a small part of what matters. Far more important are organizational elements that ripple from the IT department all the way to the front lines of a business. Pretty much everyone has to be attuned to how AI works and where its blind spots are, especially the people who will be expected to trust its judgments. All this requires not just money but also patience, meticulousness, and other quintessentially human skills that too often are in short supply.
