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What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
The tech landscape is changing rapidly and having an AI system in place will certainly help improve efficiency, but what exactly is AI? Dr Janet Bastiman, Chief Science Officer at StoryStream explains:
So what is AI and what are its capabilities?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is intelligence gained by the use of a machine rather than human or animal. It is fundamentally a computer program that appears to make an intelligent decision based on its inputs. Around since the 1950s, these systems were originally completely programmed by humans, but more recently they have been given the freedom to learn what inputs should result in which decisions, called ‘machine learning’. A subset of this is ‘deep learning’, where the data is far more abstracted and progresses through many layers in a manner inspired by the human brain. New innovations in computer science is challenging and enhancing the ways we work and live.
Image recognition or creation, diagnostics of disease, translation of text into multiple languages etc have all been mastered by some AI systems. AI is excellent at solving tasks that might otherwise be thought too difficult or time consuming and this is where businesses are seeing the biggest benefits and returns.
The nature in which we currently create AI means that it can be very good at a single task, but struggles to cope when the nature of the task is changed to something unrelated.
What does AI mean for businesses?
There are many tangible opportunities to use AI in business today. It’s all about creating better efficiency! The first opportunity is in automating repetitive processes to ease the workload of existing employees, think of labelling large amounts of data, finding similar profiles or even extracting important parts of text from large documents. The second is to use the data you have to do new things, things that wouldn’t be possible with your human workforce. Whether this is discovering correlations or trends in data that you may not have known were there, or providing a service to people who cannot otherwise access a human operative. There’s endless opportunities to get excited about.
What is Leaders in Tech?
It’s a group of managers and thought leaders who regularly get together to discuss current tech trends, share knowledge, learn new things and network. Watch our Leaders in Tech: Reading meetup page for future events.
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