The Evolution of AI: Can You Get There from Here?

The term ‘artificial intelligence’ has been around for a long time and recently has been making great strides as an enabling technology in nearly every aspect of enterprise computing and customer-facing solutions. Still it, and ancillary technologies like machine learning, have a bad wrap when it comes to the impact on humans and the workforce. Specifically, a lot of people believe that AI and machine learning will eventually eliminate jobs and possible people from the work equation.

The bad news: Yes, many repetitive and mundane jobs will be taken over by AI technologies and the need for people will be eliminated in those roles. The good news: AI will replace people in really boring yet necessary workforce roles and hopefully free those same people up for new and more challenging roles if companies take the time and effort to re-skill these displace workers.

In the meantime, the term ‘AI’ has been given a more positive spin by adding the word 'augmented' to the mix to come up with ‘augmented AI’, which essentially means that these enabling technologies will – at least for the near term – work hand-in-hand with and assist humans in being more productive and empower everyone with enhanced cognitive performance – which, if you take away the fancy window dressing means workers will be able to see relationships and make faster and better sense of data intelligence, and thereby make more accurate and effective decisions.

In reality, this is more accurate terminology for AI as it exists today since most of these systems are designed to assist or provide some filtering capability by automating tasks or applying intelligence (really logic) to an action. 

For example, AI technology is used in call centers to screen calls, provide quick responses and answers to questions, and channel people to the right departments and people for more detailed answers. AI is also used quite effectively to identify possible fraud, especially when paired with voice recognition technology. I know, since I once altered my voice a bit to get some basic information from my wife’s bank account when she was not available - purely innocent, I might add - and was quickly flagged and routed to the cyber-fraud team. Embarrassing, but an interesting lesson none-the-less.

By 2021, AI augmentation will create $2.9 trillion in business value and have a virtual hand in 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally, according to some reports. In fact, augmented AI decision support solutions may be the one segment of AI with the fewest barriers to adoption and brightest future in terms of transformational technologies.

Still, there are barriers to overcome over the next few years as AI shifts to augmented AI and then is reborn as who knows what. These barriers include culture, and humans’ innate resistance to change; fear, mostly of the unknown but also loss of control; and inability to develop strategic plans that make best use of AI and augmented AI technologies as across-the-board enablers rather than a handy little applications and smart-as-a-whip plug-ins. 

This last barrier is perhaps the most challenging since an inability to map out a workable strategic plan often happens when you do not have a clear view of long-term goals and objectives. Not a good thing because if you can’t see where you are going, my friend, then logic (AI or otherwise) insists you will never really get there.