5 AI trends changing the workplace
Presented by Jive Software
By now you’ve heard that Artificial Intelligence is poised to either destroy civilization as we know it or miraculously solve all of society’s problems. If you’re a fan of films like 2015’s Ex Machina or the HBO series Westworld, you’ll be forgiven for believing that intelligent machines will inevitably lead to a dystopian nightmare. It’s also unlikely that AI will result in a nirvana of synthetic emotional intimacy or effortless commutes any time soon either. The truth about AI, as with most things, lies somewhere between doomsday and panacea.
In the near term, AI’s greatest potential to affect our lives is in the one place most of us find ourselves every day — at work. These are the five AI trends that will have the greatest impact on the workplace in the near term.
1. Wrangling big data
Data is the grey matter for AI, so for machine learning to succeed it needs access to lots and lots of information. With big data expected to grow to 44 zettabytes of storage by 2020, information is no longer a barrier. That means fragmentation is the remaining enemy of AI. With traditional stack vendors continually adding new tools to their suites and conversational apps siloing information in a mishmash of narrowing message threads, getting at that data is becoming more challenging than ever. Forward-looking organizations are using connected hub solutions and open APIs to unlock that data so future AI systems can get at it.
2. Making your company smarter with “dumb” things: The IoT
Today, there are nearly twice as many “dumb devices” connected to the Internet as there are people on the planet. By 2020, that number is expected to triple. McKinsey estimates that within the next decade the Internet of Things (IoT) could create more than $11 trillion dollars annually in global economic value. Along with that flood of cash will be an unprecedented deluge of data. It will be up to AI to make sense of all of that information, but it’s people who will decide how to deal with it. The benefits of the IoT for business are pretty straightforward. For instance, sensors might determine that a customer needs a replacement part, so your sales team will reach out and sell them an upgrade. Internally, the IoT has the potential to deliver even greater business value.
3. Gaining competitive advantage with predictive analytics
Today, capturing information within a company is easy, but gaining insights from the interactions between that information and the systems and people that rely on it is where AI will really begin living up to its lofty promises. As employees move away from routine tasks toward more agile work, processes will become increasingly nimble too. Predictive analytics can take the pressure off by not only contextually serving up the right information at the right time, but by identifying amplifiers, drivers, and experts from across organizations, regardless of role or location.
4. Uncovering valuable insights with the work graph
Decision-making is the next evolution of enterprise AI, but don’t look for the self-aware, vengeance-seeking androids of film; this new era will be all about the work graph. A hub that captures the conversations, content, sentiment, and actions of individuals, groups and teams across multiple collaboration tools will allow predictive analytics to do its stuff. Only when leaders gain insight into those dynamic relationships will they be free to focus on the non-routine tasks that will propel their organizations into the future. Expect to hear a lot more about the work graph in the coming months and years.
5. Increasing efficiencies with interactivity
Voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo are all the rage for consumers, but, as Mary Meeker noted in her most recent Internet Trends report, speech recognition technology is ready for the office as well. In fact, don’t be surprised if voice-first becomes the next big interface for business. Soon you’ll be ordering your very own AI assistant to prioritize your meetings, organize your inbox, and create content, all without clicking on a mouse, typing on keyboard or swiping a touchscreen. Be on the lookout for virtual reality to invade the workplace as well. Once presumed to be strictly for gaming, VR is finding plenty of use cases in business. AI-powered VR systems will allow customers to try before they buy, speed employee onboarding, and supercharge innovation by allowing experts to interact with would-be products while they’re still in the conception stage.
While today’s AI is more likely to recommend nail-biting films about AI to your Netflix queue than to unleash the robot apocalypse, its expectations for business (if not yet its advantages) are high. A well-thought-out strategy will be key to unlocking the benefits we’ve planned for, rather than the consequences we haven’t.
John Schneider is VP of Product Strategy at Jive Software.
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AI is a hilariously romantic term for the automation of data analysis. I just can't conceive the decision matrices for this kind of AI that sorts big data and makes recommendations being that complex or arcane. The author is right; we're not talking Skynet or iRobot or Neuromancer (I'm old and unfamiliar with the new crop of dystopian cyberpunk stories). This kind of automation is necessary in a world where the amount of information available is hard to grasp with our fleshy brains. And I already use my iPhone to remind me to comment here, so there's that.
ReplyDeleteTo answer the implied question, this is unlikely to bring about the automated unemployment we've discussed in class, because no human could do what this kind of "AI" is built to do. At least not without spending the better part of its lifetime to do it, at which point whatever you were analyzing has been obsoleted anyway.
Honestly, I'd like to see all these AI crazy people use their smarts and enthusiasm towards improving the state of education and education here in the US and extending it globally. I don't see a point in being data monsters, and masters of data analytics if it doesn't serve a social purpose.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kriti. While the progress of AI is interesting and could be very useful to the field of data analytics, there are other areas that need attention. It would be good if these data monsters were then utilized to solve some of the societal problems given the large amounts if data it can process.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I agree with the sentiment that Kriti and Christopher are communicating, I don't know how realistic it is. If we are not able to solve our own education and societal problems, how can we expect to program something to do it for us?
ReplyDeleteI think these are all great considerations, it's hard to see what AI offers our future when the developments are yet to be made, and prioritizing education and societal issues is certainly where our minds should be. Can these ideas work in tandem? Can our progress in AI, particularly data analysis, help in our understanding of our current global issues? Maybe with the assistance of AI we can avoid so much of the human error made in analyzing these issues.
ReplyDeleteI think that these ideas can work in tandem. I feel that many of the technologies being implemented can help with more than what they are currently being used for. But first it takes someone to look beyond the innovation itself and figure out how it can be used for something pertinent to social issues.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Zoe in that we need to fix/solve our education and societal problems before we can rely on AI to do data analytics. I think that AI is being devised for the wrong purpose and we need to start using AI to help our society grow.
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