I’m pretty sure that just about every CIO has heard about artificial intelligence (AI) by now. This technology is starting to revolutionize a lot of the ways that we live our lives. AI is showing up in our cell phones and helps us to remember to do things, shows us places that we’d probably like to go based on places that we’ve been in the past, and can even recommend people that we might like to be friends with. At the same time AI is working its way into our homes via devices such as Amazon’s Echo products. What the person with the CIO job needs to realize is that their company needs to be involved with AI right now or else they stand the very real chance that their competition is going to end up passing them by.
AI In The Real World
AI is very quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives both at work and at home. We are seeing AI start to show up in the applications that we use and the social media tools that we employ to stay in contact with people. As users, we can start to get weekly suggestions based on our past behavior from our news feeds, our shopping programs, and our music listening services. How does this work? The applications that we are using are looking at our usage habits. They see things like what words we use to interact with them and then they find patterns that they can use to make recommendations to us.
The person in the CIO position should be realizing that this is all just the start of something that will be very big. There are a number of fields where it is anticipated that AI is going to start to cause some significant breakthroughs. One such field is healthcare. In areas such as looking at MRI scans to detect problems is something that AI can be taught to do much better than people can. What’s going to be important is that CIOs help the companies that have access to such data find ways to use AI to get the most out of it.
AI has completely transformed the world of online shopping. The online retailers know what you do when you are shopping in their virtual stores. They know what you have searched for. They know what you have put into your basket and then end up not buying. They also know what types of colors you are looking for. All of the data on you that they have collected is then used to determine what they will send to you in the future. It turns out that the bricks and mortar stores could be doing the same sorts of things using AI. What they need to put in place are video cameras to track their shoppers. They could also add small radio-frequency tags to their products to track them too. All of this data could be fed to AI applications and the result would be that bricks and mortar stores could be transformed also.
What’s Next For AI?
So what’s the big deal with AI? Why are we all of sudden starting to see it spring up everywhere? It turns out that what has changed the playing field is the arrival of the cloud. Now that we have almost unlimited amounts of storage that anyone can connect to, it has allowed great quantities of data to be aggregated. The arrival of all of this data has allowed CIOs to now start to think about how they can use AI to better their business.
The field of AI continues to advance at a rapid rate. People are starting to think about something that is called neural processing. Neural processing occurs when you start to look at very large data sets that have a very different architecture. What this means for a CIO is that you are now going to be able to work on much larger data sets that can be worked on at the same time.
CIOs need to be looking to the cloud service providers to see where the real innovation in AI is happening. Simply because the cloud providers have access to so much data they are able to drive the innovations that are occurring in AI. What this means is that as innovations in AI are presented to them, they can take a look at it and determine if it will allow them to change the way that they think about artificial intelligence.
What All Of This Means For You
As CIOs we are the ones who are responsible for keeping our eyes open and detecting when there are innovations that can help our company to become better. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such innovation. AI is starting to find its way into all of our lives. Companies need to realize this and start to look for ways that they can use AI or else they run the risk of being bypassed by their competition.
In our personal lives, AI is starting to show up in our phones and in the apps that we use. These AI tools watch what we do and then make recommendations based on what they have learned about us. CIOs need to realize that as AI gets access to more data, more and more breakthroughs will start to happen. One industry that can be changed by AI the world of bricks and mortar shopping. AI has become such a big deal because now just about anyone has access to almost unlimited amounts of storage in the cloud. The cloud providers have access to the greatest amounts of data and they are the ones who are truly using AI to innovate.
It’s becoming fairly clear that AI is here to stay. What this means for CIOs is that we are going to have to start to take a close look at how AI is being used and find ways to relate this to our business. The innovations in AI are continuing and this means that we need to find ways to work more AI into how our business operates. Find the data that you are going to need to feed to your AI tools and you’ll soon be getting the answers that you need in order to make good decisions for the company.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™
Question For You: Where will all of the data that you’ll need to feed to you AI tools come from?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
If you are like most CIOs, you always have too much to do and not enough time in which to get it all done. Most of us deal with this challenge by creating lists of the things that we need to get accomplished so that we don’t forget anything. Creating a list and then marking things off as we complete them is what most productivity solutions are based on. The problem is that our to-do lists just seem to keep on growing and there are things on that list that we know that we’ll never have a chance to get to do. People with the CIO job need a better way to get things done.