Artificial Intelligence: What’s New, Next, & Notable

Though artificial intelligence has been part of our technology lexicon since the 1950s, it seems its impact on our personal and business lives only increases with each passing year. Smart algorithm-augmented applications and devices have evolved through many stages including:

• Understanding natural language queries, and applying them to get more accurate results than with Boolean or programmatic queries
• Visual recognition, machine learning, and robotic process automation
• Virtual assistants and chat bots with speech to text and text to speech abilities
• Reasoning through vast amounts of data, recognizing patterns to classify it, and applying its programming to retrieve and present data when a query matches

Looking back through history is interesting, yet looking forward to what is on the horizon for AI is fascinating. Let’s look at five of the most compelling advances in AI, and how these innovations could influence our day-to-day business processes.

1. Industry-Specific Open Data Realms

Commercial enterprises are highly competitive in the real world, and their intellectual property is generally kept extremely private. Yet there are many industries where responsible data sharing between entities can turn risks into opportunities. They can benefit not just the organizations that run AI platforms, but their patients, constituents, and clients. Industries like healthcare, government, legal, education, and many more are benefiting from data sharing with peers.

One of the biggest obstacles to the advance of AI in these industries is fear of change. People worry that personal data will get into the wrong hands, or that their organizations will lose their strategic advantage by sharing information with similar or competing organizations. Strategies around how to manage documents in public repositories, like redactions, watermarks, and viewers must be considered.

Many data scientists and business leaders are discovering how they can benefit from participating in data sharing hubs and leveraging standards-based AI programming methods. They often do so to avoid being disrupted by their competitors and peer organizations that do.

2. AI and Data Privacy

Open data sharing has its place, yet data privacy regulations like GDPR in the AI era adds complexity around information governance. Structured and unstructured data are created rapidly by not only a company’s employees but its partners, customers, and other external parties.

Many organizations are anonymizing certain data to comply with privacy regulations. Others are trying out ways to allow their machine learning algorithms to process data while it is still encrypted. Many are leveraging workflow engines to classify their files and data and control internal and external accessibility.

3. Image Recognition

There is a lot more to AI image recognition technology than determining whether something is or isn’t a hot dog. AI-enabled applications are recognizing items to search for products on eBay, helping police and government intelligence officers track down suspects, and even guide autonomous vehicles to navigate streets, pedestrians, signs, and other vehicles.
One of the most exciting applications for business is image recognition in healthcare. According to IBM, medical images account for nearly 90 percent of all medical data. AI processes billions of X-Rays, CT scans, and MRIs with deep learning, then uses them to better diagnose patient symptoms and anomalies. Doing so is helping physicians to better treat patients with skin cancer, brain tumors, and many other ailments.

4. Neural Networks

The concept of neural networks, which are algorithms modeled on human brains, is one of the hottest developments in AI these days. They are going beyond data processing and learning how to apply limited bias to a customer’s tone of voice on a service call, or getting trained by industry experts to understand industry lingo, like when a stock “is heading for the moon” or when the market is “recovering from a crash.”

AI platforms are helping companies to:

• Find better employment candidates
• Empower their information workers to find the information they need faster
• Help their sales and marketing teams to opportunistically identify customers that have a need for their products and services based on late-breaking news stories
• AI may be destined to take over many of the high-volume, low-value tasks which AI algorithms are ideally suited for. Yet experts say that 80 percent of the jobs people will be doing in 2030 have yet to be invented.

5. The Future of AI Governance and Ethics

Movies like Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and TV series like Black Mirror paint bleak pictures of AI. AI-driven robots which deviate from their programming and rise up against mankind. Even visionaries like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned against what could happen if AI developers aren’t cautious with innovation in this space.
Governments are partnering with industry leaders to create policies for AI governance. Since the impact of AI advancement is all around us in our work and personal lives, it is imperative that AI technology benefits society, not just commercial interests. There are a variety of innovations on the horizon that can help you and your company extend your business applications with document management functions using AI platforms and machine learning algorithms. Keep a lookout for more information on these developments.