These are the rules of AI that change everything
After the era of the internet, of businesses being digital, we are at the start of a new era: AI. (I use the term AI as umbrella that includes machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, etc.) This era is a new game with new rules and new winners. You might be in the middle of your digital transformation journey and digital might not have fully affected your business — AI will.
AI will affect the whole economy. If the internet disrupted 20% of the economy with 20% of all businesses being digital — AI will disrupt the rest of the economy.
– Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach
This is a new game and this time it will affect your business.
How did we get there?
We had IBM’s AI, Watson, win in Jeopardy in 2011, then in 2016 Google’s AI, AlphaGo, won in Go, in 2017 AlphaGo Zero won by learning the game on its own without looking at past human games. Amazon Go opened a store to the public without cash register in 2018. In the meantime, Alexa and Google Home are successes, Siri is out there, Google translate is incredible, we chat with bots not being sure whether we’re interacting with a human or an algorithm. AI is able to write AI software. AI is better at recognising images than humans. It’s better than humans in diagnosing skin cancer, autonomous drones and autonomous transportation are in use. AI is here and all around us.
This is why AI is so powerful, this is why it will change your business:
1. Prediction/recommendation
As businesses predict what customers will love thanks to AI they are able to recommend products. Not only your past online behaviour on one platform is considered but your online behaviour on other platforms as well. The recommendations will be that accurate and personal like what people experience with Spotify Discover Weekly.
It’s scary how well @Spotify Discover Weekly playlists know me. Like former-lover-who-lived-through-a-near-death experience-with-me well.
Being able to recommend products in that personal way changes the way of shopping, it changes the way business is done. Amazon is even thinking about sending people products before they ordered it. Recommendations go for B2C but for B2B as well. Product or service offerings are complex, you train your sales people for each new product, that is obsolete now.
For the customer the complexity of a multitude of possibilities and choices is made easy, finally the customer gets what they need, when and how they need it. For the customers it will be an awesome customer experience. And businesses are able to produce and create products and services in the first place that people love.
The result of possible personalisation will be that we will have a digital personal finance assistant, insurance assistant, health and fitness assistant, career assistant, travel assistant, entertainment assistant, and so on. Personalisation is possible at scale.
But product recommendation is only one part of prediction, AI is also able to recommend business decisions (it’s just a matter of finding patterns in data with many variables), through prediction it optimises business operation and production, it predicts outcomes, for example of court cases, it trades (there are hedge funds that AI runs without human intervention), through prediction it anticipates fraud, and it predicts when constructions like windmills need to be fixed and what needs to be done before it dysfunctions.
Overall, recommendations through AI will lead to the emergence of new business models and new businesses. Most likely we will see in each industry businesses emerge built around prediction.
2. Automation
For creating an exceptional customer experience it’s not only that the interaction with a product and service is made easy through product recommendation, but by automating simple tasks for the customer, like booking a travel, planning a meeting, onboarding to a service, making a claim, etc.
Many tasks on the customer side around your product and service you automate, as well as automating tasks in the life of people that make their life easier that could become your new product or service.
Automating customer service allows you to be personal at scale. You can free your employees of boring tasks. Automation might result in moving your production back to your headquarter (Tesla’s production is in the US) because you automated the simple tasks that cheap labour did before. Automation in sourcing, production and distribution speeds up your time from product design to the finished product in the hands of the consumer, it allows you to react to change quickly.
All this is done by humans being augmented by AI interacting with machines by voice, computer vision and AI being able to do tasks. Did you know AI can write journalistic articles, write software, automate your marketing, do your accounting?
If business operation is automated how would your business look like and could your business model change? At least automation will enable businesses built on prediction to bring products and services to life easier with less resources — so putting prediction and automation together it becomes extremely powerful.
3. New patterns
New patterns means that AI sees patterns humans haven’t seen. For example, when AlphaGo did move 37 in the second game against Lee Sedol it chose a move that was new, that took people by surprise, that was not based on past human behaviour but it was a new creation. Fan Hui called the new move even “beautiful”. Not only was it something new, but it redefined the game Go, it was on a higher level than a human move was.
Another example is Arup’s AI developing a construction element with 40% less weight. Or Autodesk’s AI developing a partition element for inside an airplane with 30% less weight. AI is able to find new combinations that lead to new solutions.
A simple example is IBM’s Chef Watson finding new food combinations creating new recipes. But it’s also the company Recursion Pharmaceuticals that finds new indications for many known drugs. It’s basically getting more insights out of your data — extremely more insights.
New solutions and new products will emerge. Therefore AI should be part of your innovation process. What if your business would lead in the development of new solutions within your industry?
Do you work in an organization in Denmark, Sweden, Germany or surrounding country and want to host a half-day AI-Design Sprint in your offices to find your AI prediction, automation and new patterns opportunities in your business? Email Mike at designsprint dot ai to check our availabilities.
