Why NLP is a Great First AI Solution for Businesses

That’s according to an oft-cited Accenture study from late 2016, which found that less than half of the 1,700 business leaders interviewed in a global sample would feel comfortable trusting the advice of AI “in making business decisions.” Interviews with executives revealed that many were unsure of the technology’s usefulness, or at least its capacity to add value to their companies. Even those convinced by the promise of AI worried that implementation costs would prove too much for an investment to make sense.
The good news for companies still taking their first steps down the AI path is that there already exist affordable and straightforward AI solutions for business. Chief among them is natural language processing, more commonly known as NLP.
Simply put, NLP is the science of training machines to understand human language. In a time when cars drive themselves and robots do backflips, it’s easy to underestimate the difficulty of this task. In reality, human language is extraordinarily complicated, full of contextual rules and inflections that we take for granted.
NLP in Business
For decades, researchers tried to build ‘expert systems’ that could interpret text and speech by analyzing every possible meaning for words and sentences, a sort of massive phrasebook translating “human to machine.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t get very far. More recently, breakthroughs in machine learning have allowed programmers to train algorithms with vast quantities of human language data. Instead of the massive phrasebook trying to remember all the sentences, new NLP programs use probability and inference to make guesses about their meanings. And as it turns out, they’re getting very good at it.
Part of what makes NLP a great solution for enterprises is its end-user simplicity; once the programs have been built, they’re remarkably easy to use. The complex mechanics of an NLP system’s back-end can be neatly encapsulated within a user-friendly interface, meaning that most employees will rarely need technical expertise, and customers will be able to easily adapt. In fact, if you use Google Translate, or voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, you’re already using NLP. Thus, ‘AI solutions’ need not always entail advanced software engineering or data consulting in their implementation, but they can still result in considerable gains in workplace efficiency.
Using AI can be as simple as installing and syncing Alexa throughout a company’s office spaces, a service which Amazon is already providing as part of its Web Services business. Perhaps the most common use of NLP in business comes in the form of chatbots — programs designed to simulate conversations with people in areas like sales or technical support. Gartner forecasts that bots like these will automate up to 85% of customer interactions by 2020, and the market for them has been growing exponentially.
