Business Improvement and Social media

Sharing emotion-driven narratives that resonate with other people is something humans are quite good at. We’ve been sitting around campfires telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and we still do it. One reason why is because it’s an effective way to communicate: We remember stories.

But what makes for good storytelling?

Mark Magellan, a writer and designer at IDEO U, puts it this way: “To tell a story that someone will remember, it helps to understand his or her needs. The art of storytelling requires creativity, critical-thinking skills, self-awareness, and empathy.”

All those traits are fundamentally human, but as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace, even experts whose jobs depend on them possessing those traits — people like Magellan — foresee it playing a bigger role in what they do.

Via John Evans

As advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning permeate every industry, will there be any jobs left to protect?

Philip E. Auerswald, associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, calls this question “The Great Man–Machine Debate.” In his engaging and wide-ranging book, The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History, he seeks to answer it by reframing how we think about economic dynamics and progress. “The microeconomics you learned in college was generally limited to the ‘what’ of production: what goes in and what comes out,” Auerswald writes. “This book is about the ‘how’: how inputs are combined to yield outputs.”

Via David Hain

Mazin Gilbert has an ambitious goal. As vice president of advanced technologies at AT&T, Gilbert wants to make AI technologies widely available throughout the corporation, especially to those who might not have a computer science background and may not even know how to program. Call it the “democratization of AI.” To accomplish that goal, AT&T is building a user-friendly platform with point-and-click tools that will enable employees — up to one-quarter of the company’s workforce — to build their own AI applications.

 

AT&T and a host of other companies are trying to address a crucial issue in business: the severe shortage of AI talent. According to some estimates, only about 10,000 programmers in the world have the necessary expertise to develop advanced AI algorithms. But that’s barely a drop in the bucket for what companies will need in their future workforces. Tools like AT&T’s platform will help spread AI technologies well beyond just a limited number of “haves” and reach the “have nots” that may lack the technical knowledge and experience.

 

This democratization of AI will happen in two ways. First, it will enable employees across a large organization like AT&T to develop their own AI applications to make them better at their jobs. But it will also allow smaller firms to deploy some of the same AI capabilities that have heretofore been limited to large corporations. Think of how spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel helped democratize data analysis, enabling even mom-and-pop shops to perform invaluable “what-if” analyses.

Via The Learning Factor

Could robots change the way we think?

While that might seem the stuff of dark science fiction, New Zealand artificial intelligence (AI) experts say there's real fear that computer algorithms could hijack our language, and ultimately influence our views on products or politics.

"I would compare the situation with the subliminal advertising that was outlawed in the 1970s," said Associate Professor Christoph Bartneck, of Canterbury University's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HIT Lab.

"We are in a danger of repeating the exact same issue with the use of our language."

Via Miloš Bajčetić

Rapid technological advances in digitization and data and analytics have been reshaping the business landscape, supercharging performance, and enabling the emergence of new business innovations and new forms of competition.

 

At the same time, the technology itself continues to evolve, bringing new waves of advances in robotics, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), and especially machine learning. Together they amount to a step change in technical capabilities that could have profound implications for business, for the economy, and more broadly, for society.

Via Kenneth Mikkelsen

Pop culture and science fiction have ostensibly redefined artificial intelligence – or AI – to describe a futuristic world with robots and space-age innovations. Yes, it’s cool. And yes, it’s all the rage again, but more in the form of smarter systems and prescriptive recommendations, not Hal 9000.
Simply put, AI means making computers and machines capable of human-like, intelligent behavior. For businesses today, the promise of AI is to improve customer engagement by better anticipating customer needs and optimizing work to provide more relevant customer experiences. Recent advances in data processing speeds, big data processing, and machine learning methods – all at lower costs – means the promise of AI can be even more easily extended to most any customer engagement scenario.

But what will AI mean for marketers? Ironic as it might sound, AI technology will actually help marketing become more human. While there is talk of AI replacing marketers’ jobs, in reality it will be an asset that will make marketers more insightful, effective, and smarter about how they engage with customers and deliver meaningful experiences....

Via Jeff Domansky