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Future of Artificial Intelligence: Brexit, Trump and Other Calamities

On Friday, June 24, 2016, the world watched in horror as Britain voted to commit economic suicide as a nation.

On November 8, 2016, America will vote. Will it also commit economic and political suicide?

Increasing inequality is building up great stress in the world economic system. The disenfranchised masses are expressing their anger, including in irrational ways such as the Brexit vote.

The trends are worrisome.
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Future of Work: Utopia or Dystopia?

There’s a lot of discussion in every media outlet right now about the impact of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and over-automation. The Economist has an article titled Basically Flawed, Rethinking the Welfare State:

WORK is one of society’s most important institutions. It is the main mechanism through which spending power is allocated. It provides people with meaning, structure and identity. Yet work is a less generous, and less certain, provider of these benefits than it once was. Since 2000 economic growth across the rich world has failed to generate decent pay increases for most workers. Now there is growing fear of a more fundamental threat to the world of work: the possibility that new technologies, from machine learning to driverless cars, will cause havoc to employment.

There are two schools of thought on the subject, though.
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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions (Part 5)

Andy Peart: A lot of the conversation so far has been in building individual artificially intelligent assistants and interfaces. I think the next step is going to be about how you can build an ecosystem of these natural language applications and get them to speak to each other. That’s the subject of a number of patents that we have lumped together into the Teneo network of knowledge.

In a nutshell, that is about providing this ecosystem of intelligent assistants with know-how for handover when a specific query is asked. At the moment, on Siri for example if you want to book a flight, it would say, “Okay, let me open the relevant webpage for you.”

Wouldn’t it be so much better if you’re able to ask, “I’m looking for a flight to San Francisco tomorrow.” It knows the time you always fly British Airways because it’s learned by behaviour. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers like Shell are you working with right now? What can we learn, trends wise, on who the early adopters are?

Andy Peart: We have over 200 projects across a range of organizations. We tend to target larger organizations because they tend to be more advanced in their thinking and their whole approach to the customer experience. Also, they are recognizing that natural language is going to be critical to them over the next five years. This is partly because customers are increasingly demanding it as consumers are increasingly comfortable with talking to devices and expecting those devices to understand them.

People are now demanding that of their providers. Enterprises need to respond. Further we believe that if they don’t, it’s going to open up a real gap that will be filled by a small number of tech goliaths who will start to own the customer relationship. You look at what Amazon is doing with Echo. Why are they doing that? It’s clearly to get themselves into the household and to be able to listen in to what’s happening and control who fulfils and delivers on that and builds that customer relationship. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions (Part 3)

Andreas Wieweg: I’d probably want to add a little bit of the Shell use case.

Sramana Mitra: I would like to understand how it’s built together. What are the data sources? How does this get implemented from a technical point of view?

Andreas Wieweg: In terms of data sources, in my experience, they vary a lot in different enterprises. One might think that most enterprises have very modern, well organized, structured data sources. Actually, some do and some don’t. In this case, data comes from various data sources. They are not always accessible in APIs. If they’re accessible in APIs, we love that and we just communicate with APIs. In other cases, data sources might live in a database.

We use various technologies to input those sources. In this case, there are different data sources. We use data sources both to build the various entities and to interrogate them. Basically, we have the ability to interrogate from an API level to a loose bunch of data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to understand what customers you are going after and what the use cases are in those customers.

Andy Peart: Since it’s a platform, we, our partners, or indeed our clients can use it to build a range of different point solutions. We would refer to something like Siri as something of an artefact.

Indeed, we have an equivalent of Siri that we showcase. It’s called Indigo. It’s available across multiple platforms. It’s used by billions of people now. It’s getting rave reviews on app stores. This is an example of what we can build, but that wasn’t really the example that I was wanting to talk about. Let me bring it to light and put some real names behind it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions (Part 1)

Have you used Siri? Have you used Amazon’s Echo? Have you used any other natural language assisted personal assistant? The world of AI is rife with speculations on where this field is going, and this discussion is a wonderful expose on that topic.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Artificial Solutions and to the two of you. Tell us who you are, what your background is, and what Artificial Solutions is.

Andy Peart: I look after the marketing for Artificial Solutions. We’re going to double-act with my colleague, Andres. I’ll let him introduce himself.

Andreas Wieweg: I head the software development for Artificial Solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Dave O’Flanagan, CEO of Boxever (Part 3)

Dave O’Flanagan: The second step is using these different systems and data to be able to infer what the next best action is. That takes into account anywhere between 5 and 20 different features that are configurable by our customer. We believe that most of our customers are more than capable of being able to build these next best actions in the Boxever platform. Our role is to make sure that the data is available in real-time at the time they need it so that they can make the decision and change the customer interaction.

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a bit, as you work with these airline customers and personalize their offerings, what open problems are you identifying that are out there that may be worthwhile for new entrepreneurs to look at?

Dave O’Flanagan: There’s a couple of things we’ve seen in marketing. When we talk about ensuring that we can personalize the experience of the customer, one area that’s a real challenge both in travel and beyond is content. >>>