What Exactly is Artificial Intelligence?

A few weeks ago a friend of mine showed me his latest toy, The Amazon Echo. Billed as a ‘smart speaker’, the Echo was quite simply incredible. My friend demonstrated that by simply talking to the speaker (her name is Alexa) he could publish tweets, get the weather, make conversions from cm to inches, get music recommendations from Spotify and order an Uber. Incredible! I said, but how does it work? “Artificial Intelligence mate” was his response.

It seemed an overtly vague response, but how else could he describe this intuitive new device?

AI — So What is it?

More than just a Spielberg movie, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we work and live. The commercial applications and opportunities are truly immense. But, at the same time, there is a lot of false information out there. Thanks largely to our friends in the tabloid press, a level of fear about AI has entered our joint psyche.

Earlier this year YouGov, on behalf of the British Science Association, conducted a study into people’s perceptions of Artificial Intelligence. The results were interesting to say the least. 60% of respondents feared that “computers will lead to less jobs” and a third believe that “computers pose a threat to humanity”. Intense hey?

Well today I’d like to make an attempt to leave the rhetoric and doomsday scenarios behind and try to clarify what artificial intelligence is and how it might impact us at work.

Similar to my friends catch all response as to how his Amazon Echo works, the challenge in defining AI lies in its vagaries. Artificial Intelligence is an incredibly broad term.

Stanford University define AI in the following way.

“It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.”

Essentially it’s an umbrella term for anything to do with computers acting more intelligently (or humanly) than in the past.

A quick look at a university course outline for AI at Stanford or MIT will give you an understanding of the breath of processes we currently consider to constitute AI. Machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, neural networks and many more areas of study all currently fall under the AI banner.

To give these disciplines some real world context, the following projects, despite using vastly different processes and mechanics, are all classified as AI.

• Fraud detection on your credit card
• Googles self driving car.
• Automated news through Wordsmith.
• Spotify’s recommendation engine
• ‘Alexa’ Amazon’s all-talking, all Uber-requesting speaker.

So perhaps, the most important concept to grasp when trying to understand the term AI is that the definition is a fluid one, it’s evolving. It’s a bucket term used to describe a vast number of processes many of which vary incredibly.

To understand how AI may impact your job as a procurement professional, we need to take a deeper dive into the detail and start looking at the individual elements that make up AI. And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing over the coming weeks on CognitiveProcurement.com

Stay tuned to find out more.