Forget the Sci-Fi and Embrace the Engineering: Making AI Work for You

From Mark Burnett @ BearingPoint: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an increasingly essential component in many products and services. If its not in your products and services, it may well be in your competitors. There are lots of kinds of AI and even more ways of applying it to business and technical problems.

This paper on Artificial Intelligence gives a practical assessment of the state of development of AI and Machine Learning along with examples of its use and practical suggestions for what you need to consider if you want to use AI to enhance your business, products or services.

Advances in computer power, elastic cloud and the ability to quickly deploy thousands of compute instances running neural nets and other kinds of machine learning on big data cost effectively offers huge potential for automation, prediction, and generation of insights from patterns in the data that humans fail to see.

This is a paper for those wanting to find a way to make a difference now and as such, it encourages visionaries and solution designers to forget the sci-fi Utopian view of AI as a general human level intelligence for now and start by embracing the engineering problems of matching the various kinds of AI to the business problems and jobs-to-be-done they are suited for.

This is a call to tool-up, exploit the cloud, understand the different AI frameworks and platforms, and bring in the knowledge and expertise to build the right kinds of AI/ML/cognitive computing to solve business problems in practical future-proof ways that create competitive advantage from the outset.