Introduction to "Leading AI" in the REAL World.

Follow the news and hardly a day goes by without a mention – or even a headline – about AI.

Figure 1. AI in the news

Search for the term "AI' in Google and watch how AI itself return 3.5bn results in less than a second.

Figure 2. Google search for AI

It's increasingly hard to find an aspect of modern life that isn't touched, or has the potential to be touched, by AI. Manufacturing, transportation, food production, climate modelling, law enforcement, retail, media, telco, security and defence - the list of areas that AI is making inroads into covers a vast spectrum of human activity.

Walk into a KFC in Beijing and pay for your food with a smile thanks to Ali Baba's 'pay with a smile application'.

Figure 3. Jack Ma, founder of Ali Baba shows how to pay with a smile online. Picture, Marketing to China

Call an UBER, and watch AI find you a driver, optimise the route and set the price. UBER AI may also soon be able to tell if you have had too much to drink by analysing the way you are using your phone.

Figure 4. Call an UBER. Picture source, UBER Engineering

If you are unfortunate enough to end up having to be treated in hospital, you may well find a range of healthcare tasks, especially in the area of diagnosis, use AI to augment staff.

Figure 5. AI is increasingly used in medicine. Picture source, Unsplash

Controversially, some courts in the USA are even used AI to help make sentencing decisions.

Figure 6. AI has been controversially used in criminal trials.

Analyst Gartner has forecast that AI growth is accelerating. “Four years ago, AI implementation was rare – only 10% of survey respondents reported that their organisations had deployed AI or would do so shortly,” said Chris Howard, distinguished research vice-president at Gartner. “For 2019, that number has leapt to 37% – a 270% increase in four years.

“If your organisation doesn’t use AI, the chances are high that your competitors do and this should be a concern.”

AI seems to have burst onto the scene recently, but AI is far from new.

The roots of AI go back to the 1700s, when, in 1763 Thomas Bayes develops a statistical framework which will become a leading approach in machine learning. Following his work as a codebreaker in WW2, Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950) in which he proposes “the Imitation Game” which will later become known as the “Turing Test.”

In 1955 the term “Artificial Intelligence” is coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College) and Marvin Minsky (Harvard University). The resulting workshop in 1956 is considered by many as the birth of AI as we know it today.  

Two spectacular displays of the capabilities of AI were showcased by IBM. In 1997 Deep Blue becomes the first computer chess-playing program to beat a reigning world chess champion, followed by Watson, a natural language question answering computer, defeats two former Jeopardy! champions in 2011.

More recently, in 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champion Lee Sedol conquering arguably the most complex board game known to mankind.

But why does this surge in interest and activities around AI seem so recent?  

The key inflection point was the sharp increase in effectiveness of Neural Networks at the same time as mobile phones started to generate exponential amounts of data (Big Data). Combined, Neural Networks with Big Data in Deep Learning systems now give us extraordinary levels of predictive capability. 

AI is significantly different from previous technologies in that it can take the place of human cognition and exceed human performance in a growing number of areas. This raises concerns about jobs, ethics and security.

Furthermore, AI is a driver for around 1/2 of the new and emerging digital technologies. To see a single category of technology drive so many other technologies makes AI impossible to ignore. 

Whist it’s not yet distributed evenly, AI is most certainly here and already making big impacts across a range of organisations. It is marching into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves and transforming the way organisations are run and structured. New businesses are being created with AI at their core. Yet most organisational leaders only have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it can do; and they’re missing out on the opportunities that AI can bring.  

PWC estimate that potential contribution to the global economy from AI could be $15.7tr with boosts to GDP for local economies by up to 26% by 2030. 54% of business executives say AI solutions implemented in their businesses have already increased productivity[i]. Labour productivity improvements will drive initial GDP gains as organisations seek to "augment" the productivity of their people with AI technologies and to automate some tasks and roles. 

AI will also drive greater product enhancements, product variety, and increased personalisation, attractiveness and affordability which will stimulate consumer demand.

According to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee writing in the Harvard Business Review[ii]  AI is poised have a transformational impact because it allows us to build systems that learn how to perform tasks on their own, so we can automate many more tasks than before. AI systems can be excellent learners and can achieve performance beyond that attainable by people in a wide range of activities, including detecting fraud and diagnosing disease, for example. 

Although it is already in use in thousands of companies around the world, most big opportunities have not yet been addressed. The effects of AI will be amplified in the coming decade, as virtually every industry transforms core processes and business models to take advantage of AI. 

Say "Hello" to AI.