What every entrepreneur needs to know about Artificial Intelligence

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “Artificial Intelligence”?

If it involves leather jackets, liquid metal, and a whole lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you might be a victim of Hollywood folklore. The Terminator series may be a great cineastic achievement, but it is not necessarily an accurate depiction of this oh-so-mysterious technology. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have to be so scary and futuristic. The current reality is quite a different one and whatever we do, AI is and will be a great part of our realities. Every entrepreneur should start realizing this and see it as an huge opportunity to create new innovative businesses.

So here are 5 steps for going from “WTF?” to FTW (for the win)…

1. Realize why “the future is now.”

Artificial Intelligence as a research interest has been around since the 1950s, but only in the last few years have we seen serious advances in the most useful applications. The field as a whole has gone through several so-called “AI winters” and summers. The early 2000s were one of these winters — now the summer is in full force again and it’s looking like a long one with great harvests. What’s different now?

- Moore’s Law has given us both computing power and data storage that is ubiquitous and cheap, which means everybody is using it (“Big Data”)

- A couple of research breakthroughs have happened that take advantage of all this new data, e.g. unsupervised learning, deep learning, vast neural networks, etc

- All the tech giants are seeing the potential and, more importantly, real commercial use cases, which means a significant increase in investment both in basic research but also concrete, narrow applications

Although AI has been around for awhile, it’s taken the tech world until now to create the ecosystem necessary to integrate it into daily life. Now it’s time for entrepreneurs to enter the arena.

2. Understand the basics

If Terminator or Skynet are the only things you associate with Artificial Intelligence, then it’s best to update your understanding with some more recent and fact based insight.

These are some of the most prominent AI goals:

- Computer Vision, e.g. Google Photos

- Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generation (NLG), e.g. Siri

- Problem-solving, e.g. Watson

The technologies that make these goals achievable are:

- Neural networks (here’s how it can beat Super Mario…)
- Evolutionary algorithms (used in the example above)
- Deep Learning (which is behind recognising and classifying images)

3. Recognise you’re already using it — every day

If you use any of the Internet big three (Facebook, Google, E-mail), then you’re interacting with what are becoming more and more intelligent systems.

- Facebook uses what is called “Machine Learning” to serve you what it thinks are the most relevant stories in your news feed. The algorithm learns from every interaction you have with it, trying to find patterns in them. All with the goal of decreasing unwanted and increasing desired stuff.

- Google uses a technology called “Rankbrain” for a very large fraction of the millions of search queries a second it gets every single day. It’s been just a few months in deployment, but the company says that this and other technologies like it are its future.

- E-Mail has been using smart algorithms to sort out spam and phishing mails for a long, long time. But because it has become so ubiquitous, we don’t call it AI anymore.

4. New problems, new opportunities

Machines that learn, like any other new technology, create a new set of problems and opportunities. But Artificial Intelligence is a special case, because it affects the whole digital world on which most of the global communications, transportation, and business infrastructure rests. Everything can be affected by it.

One interesting problem is faced by Elon Musk’s automotive company Tesla. The company is starting to use Autopilot software in all its cars, which already have prevented a number of accidents. But what happens when the software encounters a situation where it has to make ethical decisions? Will it crash the vehicle and kill its owner to avoid harming a group of strangers on the street? Programmers are suddenly being faced with complex, life-or-death consequences of their designs.

The greatest opportunities lie in automating a large part of physical and even cognitive labor, previously exclusively human domains of competence. The field of advanced robotics alone (self-driving cars and manufacturing machines) is projected to generate an additional $ 2 trillion by 2025, bound to disrupt the way we work and live significantly. Powerful algorithms are being used to fight diseases, automate wealth management, and put a wealth of information not at the touch of a button, but at the vibration of a vocal cord. That is another development likely to come from AI: the way we interface with the internet and machines altogether will move from dashboards and keyboards to voice, and ultimately thought with Brain Computer Interface technology.

5. What you can do right now

The first thing to do is realizing that AI has ceased to only be the stuff of movies. It’s here, it’s happening, and it’s probably not as scary as you thought it would be. What you can do is start becoming conscious of the changes happening in the field. Start reading up on it, follow some prominent people on Twitter, talk to someone immersed in the technology (I’ll be happy to connect you) and start thinking about how you could build a business around it, or using one of those technologies.

The second thing you can do is try out some cool new services that utilize AI.

- If you’re a programmer or entrepreneur, play around with craft.ai’s API to explore the smart capabilities you could integrate into your application or service

- If you’re running an online business or freelance with your own website, try out Narrative Science’s Quill Engage. It’s a tool that connects to your Google Analytics, goes through the numbers, and sends you intelligible reports in story form that outline the most important developments in the past day, week, or month, right to your inbox

- Any busy person who has one or more meetings a week can benefit from x.ai’s scheduling assistant Amy. She can do the tedious e-mail ping pong with your colleagues, business contacts, and even friends, saving you hours of back and forth just to find a good time to meet. In any occupation that is worth real money. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and wouldn’t want to go back! x.ai is still in beta with a waiting list, but you can get access to it this week by participating in a conference I’m organising…

The third thing (if you happen to be in Chile this week) you can do is participate in AI Nexus, Latin America’s first innovation event related to Artificial Intelligence, happening this week in Santiago. As part of your participation you get exclusive access to x.ai’s scheduling assistant Amy, which only a few hundred people from the tech elite in Silicon Valley are using today. Our guest speakers are part of that tech elite.

The conference on Friday morning is open to the public. It normally costs $ 20.000 CLP, but “The Chile Experience” members receive a 20 % discount with the code “THECHILEEXPERIENCE”.

Simply visit the website and book your ticket:

I will see you there!

Moritz Bierling
Science Ambassador @ Exosphere