Are You Aware of the Impact of AI on Your Business?

Some of the most relevant Spanish Artificial Intelligence stakeholders gather every 3 months through city.ai, a platform that organizes events for analyzing the impact of A.I.. The last city.ai event was held in Madrid on April 6, with speakers from many different companies providing their insight. Artificial Intelligence applications in businesses and the daily challenges of Deep Learning were some of the topics discussed.

Ana de Prado (Machine Learning Program Leader) and Gabriel Muñoz (Data Scientist), from Intelygenz A.I., were some of the experts participating in the event. Their talk started with the state of A.I., highlighting that we can find A.I. tech everywhere, even in places where we are not aware of its presence. For instance, facial recognition is used by entertainment systems and smartphones to identify users, car companies are launching their driverless cars, and medicine is employing patterns for the early detection of health problems, which can be more effective than humans. And, of course, personal assistants stepping into our homes. Hence the prediction of Ana and Gabriel:

“It is absolutely clear that A.I. is already part of our lives, and no other technology is going to grow faster than Artificial Intelligence” Ana de Prado & Gabriel Muñoz

Medicine, Personal Assistants… But, What About Business?

Intelygenz A.I. experts delved into A.I. applications for businesses. Business decisions are based on patterns, therefore, one can optimize the definition of these patterns to make them as accurate as possible. In fact, some traditional business decisions have not been made using rational data, but with intuition, because of relationships, or based on past experiences. Decisions associated with pricing, new products, strategy or negotiations have been made based on erroneous or inaccurate pattern recognition. This is the scenario in which a business can benefit from A.I. the most. Thanks to data entered into a trained system, A.I. can learn, predict and recommend the best course of action, making decisions where humans are too slow or inaccurate.

A.I. applied to business advantages

However, accuracy is not the only benefit of applying A.I. to business, and as Ana and Gabriel explained, it has many other advantages:

• Time-to-market: being the first to break into a sector, or delivering the right thing at the right time in a highly competitive environment can make the difference.
• Production-readiness: by focusing on the actual business workflow, you can develop a solution that is integrated into everyday decisions.
• Multi-sectorial: according to a research conducted by the Harvard Business Review, information technology, marketing, finance, accounting, and customer service are all sectors working with A.I. solutions, though it can be found in any industry. As Ana and Gabriel highlighted, the Intelygenz A.I. solution has been implemented in electricity generation prediction, call center classification, train-tracking, planet detection, infrastructure monitoring, and other areas.
• Automation: a huge volume of resources can be saved with automation.
• Time savings: according to an analysis conducted by Business Insider, A.I.-powered platforms, apps, interfaces, and bots help companies spend less time on routine administrative tasks and more on improving strategies, improving customer service, or creating better products, for example.

Deep Learning challenges

Our experts Ana and Gabriel admitted that, even though it is a fascinating topic, this field of expertise presents many challenges. The quality of data is only one of them, as well as volume. Media coverage is also one of these challenges, as the news gives us an inaccurate image of AI projects, displaying only the success stories. Another challenge mentioned by Ana and Gabriel is the opposition between laboratory and production, and the details that must be taken into account, such as those associated with Python, Tensorflow or Keras frameworks. According to Ana, “the perfect framework depends on the customer and on the objective.” But one of the biggest challenges these experts face in their day-to-day work is definitely customer expectations: “Deep Learning (DL, a branch of Artificial Intelligence in which Intelygenz A.I. specializes) is not always the best solution for a customer, and we must be honest and explain this to them,” stated Gabriel to the people attending Madrid.A.I..

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