Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation

Rashed Haq

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119665977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation

AI is everywhere. From doctor's offices to cars and even refrigerators, AI technology is quickly infiltrating our daily lives. AI has the ability to transform simple tasks into technological feats at a human level. This will change the world, plain and simple. That's why AI mastery is such a sought-after skill for tech professionals.

Author Rashed Haq is a subject matter expert on AI, having developed AI and data science strategies, platforms, and applications for Publicis Sapient's clients for over 10 years. He shares that expertise in the new book, Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation.

The first of its kind, this book grants technology leaders the insight to create and scale their AI capabilities and bring their companies into the new generation of technology. As AI continues to grow into a necessary feature for many businesses, more and more leaders are interested in harnessing the technology within their own organizations. In this new book, leaders will learn to master AI fundamentals, grow their career opportunities, and gain confidence in machine learning.

Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation covers a wide range of topics, including:

• Real-world AI use cases and examples
• Machine learning, deep learning, and slimantic modeling
• Risk management of AI models
• AI strategies for development and expansion
• AI Center of Excellence creating and management

If you're an industry, business, or technology professional that wants to attain the skills needed to grow your machine learning capabilities and effectively scale the work you're already doing, you'll find what you need in Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Transformation.

Part I
A Brief Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 1
A Revolution in the Making

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Edsger W. Dijkstra, professor of computer science at the University of Texas

Since the 1940s, dramatic technological breakthroughs have not only made computers an essential and ubiquitous part of our lives but also made the development of modern AI possible – in fact, inevitable. All around us, AI is in use in ways that fundamentally affect the way we function. It has the power to save a great deal of money, time, and even lives. AI is likely to impact every company's interactions with its customers profoundly. An effective AI strategy has become a top priority for most businesses worldwide.

Successful digital personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa have prompted companies to bring voice-activated helpers to all aspects of our lives, from streetlights to refrigerators. Companies have built AI applications of a wide variety and impact, from tools that help automatically organize photos to AI-driven genomic research breakthroughs that have led to individualized gene therapies. AI is becoming so significant that the World Economic Forum¹ is calling it the fourth industrial revolution.

The Impact of the Four Revolutions

The first three industrial revolutions had impacts well beyond the work environment. They reshaped where and how we live, how we work, and to a large extent, how we think. The World Economic Forum has proposed that the fourth revolution will be no less impactful.

During the first industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the factory replaced the individual at-home manufacturer of everything from clothing to carriages, creating the beginnings of organizational hierarchies. The steam engine was used to scale up these factories, starting the mass urbanization process, causing most people to move from a primarily agrarian and rural way of life to an industrial and urban one.

From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, the second industrial revolution was a period in which preexisting industries grew dramatically, with factories transitioning to electric power to enhance mass production. The rise of the steel and oil industries at this time also helped scale urbanization and transportation, with oil replacing coal for the world's navies and global shipping.

The third industrial revolution, also referred to as the digital revolution, was born when technology moved from the analog and mechanical to the digital and electronic. This transition began in the 1950s and is still ongoing. New technology included the mainframe and the personal computer, the Internet, and the smartphone. The digital revolution drove the automation of manufacturing, the creation of mass communications, and a scaling up of the global service industry.

The shift in emphasis from standard information technology (IT) to artificial intelligence is likely to have an even more significant impact on society. This fourth revolution includes a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres² and is marked by breakthroughs in such fields as robotics, AI, blockchain, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and autonomous vehicles, as well as the combinatorial innovation³ that merges multiples of these technologies into sophisticated business solutions. Like electricity and IT, AI is considered a general-purpose technology – one that can be applied broadly in many situations that will ultimately affect an entire economy.

In his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab says, “Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind. In its scale, scope, and complexity, what I consider to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”⁴ This fourth revolution is creating a whole new paradigm that is poised to dramatically change the way we live and work, altering everything from making restaurant reservations to exploring the edges of the universe.

It is also causing a significant shift in the way we do business. Changes over the past 10 years have made this shift inevitable. Companies need to be proactive to stay competitive; those that are not will face more significant hurdles than ever before. And things are happening more quickly than many people realize. The pace of each industrial revolution has dramatically accelerated from its pace in the previous one, and the AI revolution is no exception. Even companies such as Google, which has led the mobile-first world, has substantially shifted gears to stay ahead. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai vowed, “We will move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.”⁵

Richard Foster, of the Yale School of Management, has said that because of new technologies an S&P company is now being replaced almost every two weeks, and the average lifespan of an S&P company has dropped by 75% to 15 years over the past half-century.⁶ Even more intriguing is that regardless of how well a company was doing, its prior successes did not afford protection unless it jumped on the technology innovations of the times.

Along similar lines, McKinsey found that the fastest-growing B2B companies “are using advanced analytics to radically improve their sales productivity and drive double-digit sales growth with minimal additions in their sales teams and cost base.”⁷ In another paper, they estimated that in 2016, $26 billion to $39 billion was invested in AI, and that number is growing.⁸ McKinsey posits the reason for this: “Early evidence suggests that AI can deliver real value to serious adopters and can be a powerful force for disruption.”⁹ Early AI adopters, the study goes on, have higher profit margins, and the gap between them and firms that are not adopting AI enterprise-wide is expected to widen in the future.

All this is good news for businesses that embrace innovation. The changeover to an AI-driven business environment will create big winners among those willing to embrace the AI revolution.

AI Myths and Reality

To most people, AI can seem almost supernatural. But at least for the present, despite its extensive capabilities, AI is more limited than that. Currently, computer scientists group AI into two categories: weak or narrow AI and strong AI, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is defined as AI that can replicate the full range of human cognitive abilities and can apply intelligence to any given problem as opposed to just one. Narrow AI can only focus on a specific and narrow task.

When Steven Spielberg created the movie AI, he visualized humanoid robots that could do almost everything human beings could. In some instances, they replaced humans altogether. AGI of this type is only hypothetical at this point, and it is unclear if or when we will develop it. Scientists even debate whether AGI is actually achievable and whether the gap between machine and human intelligence can ever be closed. Reasoning, planning, self-awareness: these are characteristics developed by humans when they are as young as two or three; but they remain elusive goals for any modern computer.

No computer in existence today can think like a human, and probably no computer will do so in the near future.¹⁰ Despite the media attention, there is no reason to be concerned that a simulacrum of HAL,¹¹ from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, will turn your corporate life upside-down. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction, and there is already a large variety of successful and pragmatic applications, some of which are covered in Part II. The majority of these are narrow AI, and some, at best, are broad AI. We define broad AI as a combination of a number of narrow AI solutions that together give a stronger capability such as autonomous vehicles. None of these are AGI applications.

So how are companies using AI to succeed in this ever-changing world?

The Data and Algorithms Virtuous Cycle

More companies are recognizing that in today's evolving business climate, they will soon be valued not just for their existing businesses but also for the data they own and their algorithmic use of it. Algorithms give data its extrinsic value, and sometimes even its intrinsic value – for example, IoT data is often so voluminous that without complex algorithms, it has no inherent value.

Humans have been analyzing data since the first farmer sold or bartered the first sheaf of grain to her first customer. Individuals, and then companies, continued to generate analytics on their data through the first three industrial revolutions. Data analysis to improve businesses became even more indispensable start...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: Artificial Intelligence and the New Generation of Technology Building Blocks
• Prologue: A Guide to This Book
• Part I: A Brief Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Part II: Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise
• Part III: Building Your Enterprise AI Capability
• Part IV: Delving Deeper into AI Architecture and Modeling
• Part V: Looking Ahead
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement