Disruptive AI Bots Are Aleady Delivering Radical Leaps In Productivity (venturebeat.com)

The CTO of Textio is describing the "already happening" AI disruption that no one's noticed, arguing that voice-activated assistants are "just one small part of what AI is about -- and not the part that will matter the most for the enterprise companies that actually buy almost $4 trillion in software and services each year." An anonymous reader writes: Jensen Harris describes "the less-flashy flavor of AI that is changing the nature of work itself: headless AI...the application of artificial intelligence to vastly improve internal business processes. It is fully transforming the crucial machinery of business -- processes like hiring, lead generation, financial modeling, and information security. Legacy software has become a commodity in all of these areas, and purpose-built AI solutions will get a larger and larger wallet share of these huge enterprise cost centers."

Combining machine intelligence with learning loops, these constantly-evolving algorithms are "where the money is," since headless AI "doesn't try to replace people; it gives them superpowers" -- for example, predicting the future. Harris ultimately argues that headless AI are delivering "radical productivity leaps that they haven't seen from software in decades... In the near future, every core business function will have been transformed by AI -- hiring, sales, security, marketing, finance, manufacturing...everything... Legacy software will get squeezed down into a smaller portion of the IT wallet as the most valuable services become the native AI platforms -- just as form-based desktop software got squeezed out by the cloud in the last generation... the real enterprise revolution is happening in the companies that are using headless AI to transform their core businesses."
By comparison, he argues that many of today's bots "are kind of a hipster facade around the same basic command line interfaces consumers abandoned in the 1980," and suggests this focus on personality misses the larger significance of behind-the-scenes AI.

Comments

Hipster Facade

[Lije Baley]

Sounds redundant. But basically true. Seriously though, there is very little substance in the latest "AI revolution", just like every other "AI revolution" in the last 70 years. The solutions still lack adequate knowledge of context and still push tricks and training depth beyond their effective limits.

Re: Hipster Facade

[Anonymous Coward]

If they analyze probabilities better than people, that is by definition a "superpower", even if giving it that label probably exaggerates the impact.

Re: Hipster Facade

[saloomy]

It is a poorly written summary, and not quite accurate, but it does speak to a level of business automation and processing that is becoming cheap and ubiquitous. We made a simple center of gravity algorithm that calculates where a CPG company should place its next distribution center based on current orders, in order to reduce freight costs. Not very hard. But add in a population map, and look at where our market penetration was not up to par with the rest of the country, and you could suddenly model the effect of the distribution plant on sales growth (as transport was a leading factor in cost of this particular good), and suddenly, you were giving business a crystal ball. This sort of AI is not hard if you know how to code, and can access the relevant data, but it's getting much more prevalent.

Re: Hipster Facade

[ShanghaiBill]

It is a poorly written summary, and not quite accurate

I don't think it is accurate at all. The guy spouting hype is the CEO of Textio, which is selling the very thing he is hyping. If any of this was actually happening at scale, productivity growth would be soaring. It is not. It is stagnating.

We made a simple center of gravity algorithm that calculates where a CPG company should place its next distribution center ... This sort of AI is not hard if you know how to code

How is this "AI"? It sounds like you used a hand coded an algorithm, without any machine learning or any other AI techniques.

"Disruptive"

[Dutch Gun]

Smelling some serious Silicon Valley marketing bullshit in here. Damn, the whole summary is a buzzword bingo paradise. Question: what AI *isn't* "headless"? He just means "non-customer facing", right? Don't overload the term in confusing ways.

Am I just grumpy this morning, or is this summary as asinine as it seems to me right now? Not only is this schmuck cranking the AI hype train whistle up to 11, he's not nearly as insightful as he thinks it is. Um, yeah, no kidding that AI (a fancy term for advanced data analysis, mostly) will be useful to businesses, instead of the stupid chat bots now being displayed. And yeah, it seems pretty obvious it's not going to put everyone out of work (at least not in the short term), but will just be another tool people use.

Maybe I'm just getting tired of the over-hyping of AI. Almost makes me miss the 3D printing fad.

Re:"Disruptive"

[Mitreya]

Um, yeah, no kidding that AI (a fancy term for advanced data analysis, mostly) will be useful to businesses, instead of the stupid chat bots now being displayed.

How appropriate that a previous story talks about AI algorithms deployed in the real world can be easily confused by knowledgeable attackers.

Re:"Disruptive"

[Richard Kirk]

He just means "non-customer facing", right?

I think you are just grumpy this morning.

What he means is what he says - you can have an AI helper that you can talk to, and replies in a seemingly intelligent manner, without having all the self awareness, and the OMG! Bots are going to murder us in our beds!! nonsense we have had from Steven Hawking, or the singularity quasi-rapture predictions of Kurzweil et al. The first implementation of AI's is probably going to be something that will be guided by humans rather than replacing them. Cars that drive themselves, but will come safely to a stop or ask for help if they see something they cannot understand. TV remotes that can respond to speech, and find something you might like to watch without flipping channels. Less "Open pod bay doors, Hal" "I'm sorry, Dave. I cannot do that", and more "Shit! Did I forget to turn off the oven, Hal?" "Yes, you did, Dave. I turned it down a bit there was nothing in it. Would you like me to turn it off?

There is a lot of AI bull about. Oddly enough, I don't think this particular article was an example. But maybe I'm wrong.

If you've got radical productivity leaps

[rsilvergun]

you're replacing people. Maybe they'll find other work. Maybe their departments will grow a little. But if the change really is radical and that's not just hyperbole than the rest of the economy won't be able to keep up. That's what happened with the industrial revolution. 80 years of unemployment strife and poverty before there was enough new tech to start employing folks in mass again...

TFA is an advertisement

[Northdot]

Who would have guessed that an article written by a vendor of AI software says not only that it gives you superpowers, but if you don't jump on the train now your business is totally f*cked.

Re:AI to identify hype about AI

[murdocj]

I think I could write that AI. Train it by feeding it a few Slashdot summaries so it can learn which buzzwords indicate BS by the company that is marketing something, and voila, productivity increases by ignoring such crap.