By Rube Huljev1
1CEO, Genuyn
Artificial intelligence (AI): beloved and dreaded. These days AI is significantly hyped, through inflated expectations and false promises, while attention-grabbing titles induce fear of mass job losses and computers taking control, like The Matrix in action. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us, although the full scope of its impact is still impossible to perceive. Instead of coal and electricity, this revolution will be powered by data. As history teaches us, with each industrial revolution comes the disruption of the job market and subsequent exponential creation of new types of jobs that better fit the needs of the new world. Which types of jobs will survive and thrive? Is there a common denominator connecting them? Can we prepare for the Age of the Machine?
Of course, the truth is quite simple, and it comes down to two words: creativity and imagination.
The very thing that created our civilization and made Homo sapiens thrive will continue to be our edge against (or with) the machines. Any job that is not based on simple repetitive tasks, especially if it involves interaction with people in one form or another, is secure and will continue to exist in the foreseeable future. But where does this leave other “less sophisticated” or blue-collar jobs, the likes of accountants, clerks, assembly-line personnel, call centre personnel, support staff – will they become part of the growing and angry army of people waiting for state welfare? No. They will evolve and become more useful and efficient than ever. Imagine a situation in any given hotel during a busy period, where repetitive and simple tasks are no longer dealt with by a human receptionist but by a trained, self-improving AI model.
What this creates is time. And specifically, time for human personnel to deal with meaningful interactions and tasks that enhance the experience of guests; time to sell additional services that clients actually want. AI in the near future will take the form of assistants for clients and personnel, dealing with 80% of requests in real time, while freeing up human employees for meaningful work that actually creates new value for the organization. So, where have these paradigm shifts appeared and in which areas? Which are the top trends and smartest fields for application of this new technology?
During late 2018, several research papers were published by Google, laying the foundations for new mathematical models that really moved AI-based natural language understanding and natural language processing forward in a big way, one of them being the BERT model. The breakthrough is allowing computer systems to be fed a knowledge base on any subject while the computer reads it with understanding. This has many applications, from question answering, customer support channel optimization and (finally) intelligent chatbots, to automated email and phone call processing and prioritization, to name but a few.
Computers don’t see language as we do – for them words, sentences, statements are simply multidimensional vectors. This has an important implication – all languages are treated the same. It will, therefore, become possible to elaborate and answer questions in Swahili the same way as in English, which is a very powerful capability, especially when these models are pre-trained on massive amounts of text, allowing fast specialization through focused training on a narrow subject.
Homo sapiens is an imperfect, illogical being, driven by emotion. Our imperfections also power our biggest advantage over AI, namely our creativity. The aspect of AI that is actually able to predict our behaviour with accuracy, and which will only get better through the years, is models of human personality. Advances in personality prediction have allowed mass opinions to be swayed at scale. AI in the (near) future will bring not only the ability to predict, but also to personalize engagement based on personality.
Customers and prospects of any business have many questions and this trend will increase exponentially in the future with the introduction of more sophisticated technologies and new channels of interaction. What they will have exponentially less of is patience, as they demand instantaneous responses to their questions. AI will help to automatically answer most of the interactions while routing the important and complex requests to human personnel for best results.
Demand creation and inflow of prospects is not so much of a problem today – businesses that invest money in marketing can easily stimulate interest and inbound traffic with staggeringly focused targeting. However, converting that interest into sales is entirely a different matter which can be massively optimized through AI use and assistance of AI to sales personnel. How exactly, one may ask? The secret of sales conversion of leads lies in immediacy. When prospects are automatically engaged by AI at the exact moment of interest, supported and “kept warm”, advanced through the funnel by AI automation and then at the crucial moment passed on to the human salesperson who is equipped with focused information that pinpoints customer interests, purchasing history and product information and brings the purchase cycle to fruition.
While the US and the UK have definite advantages in the areas of AI research and applications, the international superpower that is poised to reign supreme is China. The reason for this is not simply attributable to their creativity or the number of talented AI scientists. No. China has one unparalleled asset in its arsenal which is the access it has to billions and billions of records of every kind. AI models, however advanced, are only as smart as the quantity, quality and variety of data they are fed. And the Big Dragon is being fed all the data it can eat, which is why its lead is getting longer by the millisecond.
The future holds many wonders, and huge pitfalls. It is up to us, humans, to define what happens both now and tomorrow. Will AI be our loyal ally or a foe to be feared? The time to choose is now. It is our responsibility to choose smartly.