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Executives Say AI Will Change Business, But Aren't Doing Much About It (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-we-are-handling-it dept.

American business executives expect artificial intelligence to have a large impact on their companies, but few are actually doing anything with AI, according to a new MIT- Boston Consulting Group survey. From a report: Key takeaways, per co-author and BCG senior partner Martin Reeves: Nearly 85% of the 3,000-plus executives surveyed expect AI will give them a competitive advantage But their adoption of AI isn't matching up: just 1 in 5 of the companies use AI in some way, and only 1 in 20 incorporate it extensively. "Less than 39% of all companies have an AI strategy in place," they wrote. The barriers for adoption include: access to data to train algorithms, an understanding of benefits to their business, a shortage of talent, competing investment priorities, security concerns, and a lack of support among leaders.

2 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. What is AI? by Volda · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can someone give me the definition of AI? I ask because it keeps getting thrown around but when people get in to details they talk about pattern recognition, machine learning or data analytics. Not what I would consider AI. CTO seems to think that if a machine can read, say safety manuals, then it can make decisions on safety better then humans. We have yet to see this work.

    1. Re:What is AI? by clodney · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So long as AI is implementing techniques that work on general purpose computers, programmers will look at it and say that that is not AI, that is just code running this algorithm or that. You keep waiting for the magic to happen, and keep finding out that it is just software.

      But so what? Neural nets are making great strides in specific applications, and even though we know how they work in general, the specific way they put together associations still surprises us and lets them come up with answers we didn't expect, or implementations we would never have come up with. Computers playing Jeopardy don't do anything a human can't do, but the fact that they can do it at all is a huge leap forward compared to where we were 20 years ago. And sure the hardware is a million times faster, but as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.

      Going back to the point of magic happening, what would it take for you to decide something was AI? And if you discovered you understood all of the techniques that went in to that, would it stop being AI?