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Will Artificial Intelligence enslave or free us?

Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to reprise the role of the ominous Terminator this summer, artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic of the moment. From Stephen Hawking predicting it will be the end of humanity to Microsoft pushing its Cortana digital assistant, views vary wildly depending on who you speak to.

With so much debate at the moment, we recently gathered some of the leading AI thinkers in the UK to pick apart the threats and opportunities presented by AI. Hearing the thoughts of Mark Bishop, Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, Dan O’Hara, Senior Lecturer in English, New College of the Humanities and George Zarkadakis, novelist, science writer, and digital transformation consultant, made it clear that there is no consensus.

Taking away the potential moral issues, for businesses, the pull of embracing AI is a powerful one. Much like the cloud before it, AI represents an opportunity to utilise a previously untapped resource. Cloud computing provided the option of upscaling and downscaling computing power in an instant. AI could potentially allow businesses to tap into extra and unimaginable problem-solving capabilities. Combine both AI and the cloud, and suddenly businesses of all sizes have access to a bottomless pit of resource to call upon regardless of where they operate.

When you add in the moral issues presented by AI, particularly in terms of potentially replacing people’s jobs or removing compassion and empathy from decision making processes, it becomes a more complicated subject. Can businesses entirely replace workforces with robots? What might go wrong? We believe that instead of AI replacing humans in their entirety, it will merely help them add to their skillset and challenge them to adapt to change.

Many of the mundane and monotonous, though hugely important, jobs that require the inputting, handling of data and routine decision making can make significant improvements to the performance of a business. If they are performed with greater speed and accuracy, they are ideal tasks for companies to conduct via AI. In its place, staff will become free to focus on higher value activities and leverage the work of the AI application to drive greater service to end customers and increase shareholder value. Where some are worried AI could “hollow-out” the middle management of a business, in fact it is streamlining operations, to create a competitive advantage for the organisation, and enabling a foundation for the creation of new forms of service delivery. Combined this will add greater value to key stakeholders including customers, employees and investors.

We have seen within the field service market where organisations have adopted AI based scheduling to automate much of the work allocation and assist dispatchers to manage just the complex situations. As a result, companies have been able to dramatically increase field service productivity, significantly lower their carbon footprint by reducing travel distances and the number of trips by field staff and contractors. This is all while increasing the quality of service to their customers by increased first time fix rates and narrow accurate appointment windows that are more convenient for the end customer. This is only possible as the AI based scheduling is able to take into account huge amounts of real time and historical data to make optimal decisions. It can then also constantly monitor the situation, adjusting decisions to reflect real events that impact the way work is conducted.

These capabilities comes at a time when customers are demanding faster and better service for lower prices, so organisations must increase operational efficiency in order to remain competitive, particularly in the delivery of people-based services, where time is an even more valuable commodity as unproductive employee time can never be recaptured. It is a lost and spent resource. Bringing AI into a cloud environment enables organisations of all sizes to leverage this advanced capability and weave it into more operational environments which not only allows a business to survive, but also to compete on a bigger stage, with those extra resources available for additional services or contracts that would previously have been out of reach.

With this in mind, AI should be viewed in the same way as any new technology or asset. When PCs replaced typewriters, the value was not just the increased productivity and operational savings of no longer having to employ a typing pool of professional typists to create written communications. It enabled a paradigm shift where organisations could move to a knowledge worker centric economy and new business services were created to support their customers. In turn this helped diversify the employment market and create new roles and functions. The same will take place as AI expands its adoption into mainstream business. As has always been the case, it will be up to the individuals to work with the tools they are given and change what they do and how they do it. Far from the dystopian vision of the future we expect to see on the big screen this summer, AI will, in reality, have a tremendously positive impact on our everyday lives, in the same way it is enabling complex resource scheduling to improve the way service can be delivered by organisations today.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Steve Mason, VP of Channels, ClickSoftware .