Forbes

3 Steps To Embedding Artificial Intelligence In Enterprise Applications Forbes In the context of contemporary applications, it's hard to think of an application that doesn't use a database. From mobile to web to the desktop, every modern application relies on some form of a database. Some apps use flat files while others rely on ...

Continue reading here:

3 Steps To Embedding Artificial Intelligence In Enterprise Applications - Forbes

Forbes

How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Enterprise Software In 2017 Forbes These and many other fascinating insights are from the Cowen and Company Multi-Sector Equity Research study, Artificial Intelligence: Entering A Golden Age For Data Science (142 pp., PDF, client access reqd). The study is based on interviews with 146 ...

See the original post:

How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Enterprise Software In 2017 - Forbes

A few years back, cloud computing transformed customer management, giving every small and medium business access to unified data and communication platforms without the need to make heavy investments in IT infrastructure and staff. This time around, the next revolution in the space is being driven by artificial intelligence algorithms that help businesses automate customer outreach and make optimal use of data.

Beneath the surface of the roiling sea of data were generating hide exceptional business and sales opportunities. But the problem is theres now more information available than limited human resources and legacy tools can handle.

Fortunately, making sense of data, both structured and unstructured, is something that artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly proficient at. While were still least decades away from human-level synthetic intelligenceAI that will match the human brain in reasoning and decision makingmachine learning algorithms, computer vision, natural language processing and generation (NLG/NLP), and other forms of narrow artificial intelligence are proving to be the best complement for human activity.

AI-powered tools are now helping scale the efforts of sales teams by gleaning useful patterns from data, finding successful courses of action, and taking care of the bulk of the work in addressing customer needs and grievances.

Main providers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have started to invest in the added value of AI. Last year, SalesForce, the leader in the CRM industry, announced Einstein, an AI assistant that, when launched, will be omnipresent across its platform. Einstein puts its AI chops to work to continuously study the flood of data SalesForces collects from sales, e-commerce activity, emails, IoT generated data and social media streams among others. The AI engine will then make suggestions across different use cases. For instance, it helps sales reps focus on the most promising leads based on engagement data analysis, or gives advice on when to trigger email campaigns according to customer response history.

SAP, another top competitor in the field, is also joining the fray by adding AI functionalities to its S/4HANA cloud ERP. The tacked-on features will give automated insights into the business data the system collects. This includes monitoring accounts or preparing lists of top vendors for an organization based on their pricing, past performance and ability to deliver.

Oracle also declared its cloud AI project earlier this year, called Adaptive Intelligence. The initiative involves a series of add-on applications that integrate with its cloud suite. These apps combine third-party data with real-time analytics to optimize decisions and recommendations in various domains. For example, the AI Offers app merges data from the company cloud and the Oracle Data Cloud to extract contextual insights into individual customer behaviors and provide personalized offers as visitors browse websites powered by the Commerce Cloud.

Other players are focusing on verticals and optimizing specific disciplines. Growbots, a lead generation platform, uses machine learning algorithms to automate the prospecting process and marketing campaigns. The platform uses machine learning algorithms to scan websites and gather publicly available information, and enrich its database of profiles about people and businesses. Growbots incorporates this information with client CRM data to identify new potential customers and create tailored prospect lists. The platform integrates with SalesForce and uses AI to enhance and automate email marketing, creating tailored emails for customers, scheduling campaigns and sending follow ups at opportune times. The AI engine uses Natural Language Processing to parse responses and channel positive replies to the sales team.

Such solutions can be a boon to salespersons who are under constant pressure to meet quotas. By enhancing and automating the routine-based parts of the business process, AI-powered tools enable sales teams to focus on their efforts on better serving the more complicated and human-demanding needs of customers. Over time, as these solutions continue to process company and customer data, they become more efficient in their functionality.

Another example is Conversica, an AI-powered assistant that functions like a sales employee and reaches out to anyone who has shown interest in the company, such as by downloading a whitepaper or requesting information from the website. The assistant processes replies from customers, determines feedback and potential questions and crafts a meaningful reply. The assistant passes off the lead to a human salesperson when the time is right.

Another interesting development in the space is the advent of customer service chatbots, which have become more popular in recent years. Powered by AI algorithms, these bots are becoming much more efficient at independently identifying and resolving customer problems through natural conversation. These assistants free up staff time for more critical and complicated tasks.

Amelia is a virtual customer assistant that uses natural language processing to understand customer queries and provide answer based on data gathered from previous interactions and the company knowledge base. According to estimates, Amelia solves 55 percent of incidents. When it doesnt have an answer or senses a frustration or hostility, it will pass on to a human operator.

Soul Machines, a eerily named startup based in New Zealand, is creating chatbots with expressive digital faces that understand and manifest human emotion. Nadia, the first iteration of their technology, uses AI algorithms to discern human tone and facial expression. The developers believe these chatbots will eventually create a richer experience and be able to engage customers at a much more personal level.

These are some of the trends that are transforming the ways businesses interact with their customers. AI-powered customer support and management will surely result in more satisfied and less frustrated customers, and more productive sales teams. We expect to see more exciting developments in the space in the coming months.

Read next: Thieves use Facebook tricks to steal your money and turn it into Bitcoin

Go here to see the original:

How artificial intelligence is revolutionizing customer management - TNW

Forbes

Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leaders: Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva Forbes Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions, says Rana el Kaliouby. In the field of artificial intelligence, this is sheer heresy. Isn't the goal of AI to create a machine with human-level intelligence but without the human baggage of ...

Go here to read the rest:

Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leaders: Rana el Kaliouby, Affectiva - Forbes

Soren Schwertfeger, centre, and his team of assistants work on an automated arm at his artificial intelligence lab in Shanghai.

Soren Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany and seemed set to continue his work in Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established.

Instead, he went to China.

"You couldn't have started a lab like mine elsewhere," Schwertfeger said.

The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West invented the software and the chips powering today's digital age, has become a major player in artificial intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future. Experts widely believe China is only a step behind the United States.

China's ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell. There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country's ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor the internet.

Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China's AI capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan.

China's private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, although the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition this year opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots.

China is spending more just as the United States is cutting back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.

"It's a race in the new generation of computing," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. "The difference is that China seems to think it's a race and America doesn't."

For Schwertfeger, the money mattered. He received a grant six times larger than what he might have gotten in Europe or America. That enabled him to set up a full artificial intelligence lab, with an assistant, a technician and a group of PhDstudents.

"It's almost impossible for assistant professors to get this much money," he said. "The research funding is shrinking in the USand Europe. But it is definitely expanding in China."

Schwertfeger's lab, which is part of ShanghaiTech University, works on ways for machines, without aid from humans, to avoid obstacles. Decked out with wheeled robots, drones and sensors, the lab works on ways for computers to make their own maps and to improve the performance of robots with tasks like finding objects specifically, people during search-and-rescue operations.

Much of China's artificial intelligence push is similarly peaceful. Still, its prowess and dedication have set off alarms within the USdefence establishment. The Defense Department found that Chinese money had been pouring into USartificial intelligence companies some of the same ones it had been looking to for future weapons systems.

Quantifying China's spending push is difficult, because Chinese authorities disclose little. But experts say it looks to be considerable. Numerous provinces and cities are spending billions on developing robotics, and a part of that funding is likely to go to artificial intelligence research. For example, the city of Xiangtan, in China's Hunan province, has pledged $US2 billion toward developing robots and artificial intelligence. Other places have direct incentives for the AI industry. In Suzhou, leading artificial intelligence companies can get about $US800,000 in subsidies for setting up shop locally, while Shenzhen, in southern China, is offering $US1 million to support any AI project established there.

On a national level, China is working on a system to predict events like terrorist attacks or labour strikes based on possible precursors like labour strife. A paper funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China showed how facial recognition software could be simplified so that it could be more easily integrated with cameras across the country.

China is preparing a concerted nationwide push, according to the two professors who advised on the effort but declined to be identified, because the effort had not yet been made public. While the size wasn't clear, they said, it would most likely result in billions of dollars in spending.

Trump's proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation's spending on intelligent systems by 10 per cent, to about $US175 million. Research and development in other areas would also be cut, although the proposed budget does call for more spending on defence research and some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private UScompanies like Google and Facebook.

"The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence," said Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. "They were talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being significantly affected."

China's money won't necessarily translate into dominance. The government's top-down approach, closed-mouth bureaucracy and hoarding of information can hobble research. It threw a tremendous amount of resources toward curing severe acute respiratory syndrome, the deadly virus known as SARS, when it swept through the country 15 years ago. Yet the virus was eventually sequenced and tamed by a small Canadian lab, said Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU Shanghai and a technology writer.

"It wasn't that anyone was trying to stop the development of a SARS vaccine," Shirky said. "It's the habit that yes is more risky than no."

Authorities in China are now bringing top-down attention to fixing the problem of too much top-down control. While that may not sound promising, Wang Shengjin, a professor of electronic engineering at China's Tsinghua University, said he had noticed some improvement, such as professional groups sharing information, and authorities who are rolling back limits on professors claiming ownership of their discoveries for commercial purposes.

"The lack of open sources and sharing of information, this has been the reality," Wang said. "But it has started to change."

At the moment, cooperation and exchanges in artificial intelligence between the United States and China are largely open, at least from the USside. Chinese and USscholars widely publish their findings in journals accessible to all, and researchers from China are major players in USresearch institutions.

Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Didi Chuxing have opened artificial intelligence labs in America, as have some Chinese start-ups. Over the past six years, Chinese investors helped finance 51 USartificial intelligence companies, contributing to the $US700 million raised, according to the recent Pentagon report.

It's unclear how long the cooperation will continue. The Pentagon report urged more controls. And while there are government and private pushes out of China, it is difficult to tell which is which, as Baidu shows.

Baidu is a leader in China's artificial intelligence efforts. It is working on driverless cars. It has turned an app that started as a visual dictionary take a picture of an object, and your cellphone will tell you what it is into a site that uses facial recognition to find missing people, a major problem in a country where child kidnapping has been persistent. In one stunning example, it helped a family find a child kidnapped 27 years earlier. DNA testing confirmed the family connection.

Baidu's speech-recognition software which can accomplish the difficult task of hearing tonal differences in Chinese dialects is considered top of the class. When Microsoft announced last October that its speech recognition software had surpassed human-level language recognition, Baidu's head of research at the time playfully reminded the UScompany that his team had accomplished a similar feat a year earlier.

In an apparent effort to harness Baidu's breakthroughs, China said this year that it would open a lab that would cooperate with the company on AI research. The facility will be headed by two professors with long experience working for government programs designed to catch up to and replace foreign technology. Both professors also worked on a program called the Tsinghua Mobile Robot, according to multiple academic papers published on the topic. Research behind the robot, which in one award is described as a "military-use intelligent ground robot", was sponsored by funding to improve Chinese military capabilities.

Li Wei, a professor involved in the Baidu cooperative effort, spent much of his career at Beihang University, one of China's seven schools of national defense.

A company spokeswoman said: "Baidu develops products and services that improve people's lives. Through its partnership with the AI research community, Baidu aims to make a complicated world simpler through technology."

Still, there are advantages in China's developing cutting-edge AI on its own. National efforts are aided by access to enormous amounts of data held by Chinese companies and universities, the large number of Chinese engineers being trained on either side of the Pacific and from government backing, said Wang, of Tsinghua.

Driving that attention is a breakthrough from a UScompany largely banned in China: Google. In March 2016, a Google artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo, beat a South Korean player at the complicated strategy game Go, which originated in China. This past week, AlphaGo beat the best player in the world, a Chinese national, at a tournament in Wuzhen, China.

The Google event changed the tenor of government discussions about funding, according to several Chinese professors.

"After AlphaGo came out and had such a big impact on the industry," said Zha Hongbin, a professor of machine learning at Peking University, "the content of government discussions got much wider and more concrete."

Shortly afterward, the government created a new project on brain-inspired computing, he added.

For all the government support, advances in the field could ultimately backfire, Shirky said. Artificial intelligence may help China better censor the internet, a task that often blocks Chinese researchers from finding vital information. At the same time, better AI could make it easier for Chinese readers to translate articles and other information.

"The fact is," Shirky said, "unlike automobile engineering, artificial intelligence will lead to surprises. That will make the world considerably less predictable, and that's never been Beijing's favourite characteristic."

Additional research by Carolyn Zhang in Shanghai

The New York Times

More:

China is outsmarting America in artificial intelligence - The Australian Financial Review

Sophia, a human-like robot, being interviewed during the AI for Global Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by: International Telecommunication Union/ CC BY

Perhaps the most photographed individual at the AI for Global Good Summitin Geneva, Switzerland, last week was not a human but a humanoid called Sophia.

As I get smarter, I hope to understand people better help you, work with you as a friend, to imagine and build a better future for us all, Sophia, an uncannily human-like robot, said in a Facebook Liveinterview.

In that interview and onstage at the summit, her eyebrows lifted, she smiled gently, and her eyes lit up as she answered questions from the audience, with moments where only the glimpse of cords behind her face revealed that she is a machine.

Hanson Robotics developed Sophia as part of its mission to create genius machines that live and love, and work together with humans to build a a smarter and better future. Her creator, Dr. David Hanson, appeared alongside Sophiaat the summit, presenting her as an example of his work to develop robots that can learn creativity, empathy and compassion. These are the traits he thinks must be combined with artificial intelligence so that robots can solve problems too complex for people to solve on their own.

Sophias appearance placed her amongst some of the leading minds across academia and industry who are helping humanitarian agencies examine how AI can help meet global goals.

Discussions centered around how AI is already changing the world, ways to harness the technologys potential for good, and challenges ranging from policy to security to privacy in advancing the contributions of AI to the Sustainable Development Goals. Sessions explored applications of AI, including advancing the personalization of education, augmenting medical practice and health care policy, and improving smart cities. The event was convened by the XPRIZE Foundationand the United Nations International Telecommunications Unionin partnership with 20 U.N. agencies.

How artificial intelligence might help achieve the SDGs

Global development professionals are working on complex problems that might appeal to machine learning experts looking to use their artificial intelligence skills for good. A growing number of efforts are bringing these communities together.

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to accelerate progress towards a dignified life, in peace and prosperity, for all people, saidU.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres. The time has arrived for all of us governments, industry and civil society to consider how AI will affect our future.

The summit represents the beginnings of the U.N.s efforts to ensure advances in AI can benefit all of humanity,he said. The event was part of a broader conversation as a number of actors in the development community are looking at how AI could augment their work, for example by helping organizations to analyze and act upon the enormous volumes of data they are collecting.

Last week, chief strategy officers gathered for the World Economic Forums Industry Strategy Meetingin San Francisco asked whether AI needs a Hippocratic oath, and discussed ways to train computer scientists to understand the ethical implications of the technologies they are developing.

I actually find it hard to name a major industry that I dont think AI can transform in the next several years.

Industry experts predict that AI could have a huge disrupting effect, with all the benefits and risks that follow.

AI is the new electricity, Andrew Ng, one of the leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, told Devex at a recent eventat Stanford University on the role of AI in achieving the SDGs. I actually find it hard to name a major industry that I dont think AI can transform in the next several years.

Ng is the co-founder of the education technology company Coursera, having recently led the AI efforts at Baidu, the Chinese search engine, and at Google, where he founded and led the Google Brain project, developing deep learning algorithms. Now he says he wants to advance AI beyond the tech world.

The most obvious cases for AI use include anything a typical human can do in less than a second of thought, he said. Image recognition is one common example, but AI also has powerful applications in education and health care in both the developed and developing world, said Ng.

We believe that AI is a transformative platform that will improve everything, Zenia Tata, executive director of global development at XPRIZE, told Devex via email. As such, the implications for development professionals are huge. Whether you are working in health care, water quality, market access for smallholder farmers or financial services for the underserved, AI will help you do it better in so many ways, as an example it will help with rapidly analyzing data and create predictive models.

As they have done with other technologies, developing countries may be able to leapfrog with some AI applications, because there are fewer regulatory barriers there for entrepreneurs looking to test these technologies, Ng said.

Yet while developing countries stand to benefit, they also face the greatest risk of being left behind, Guterres of the U.N. said.

One of the sessions at the summit in Geneva centered around promoting equality in access to AI. Discussions centered around how to ensure access to potential beneficial applications, such as diagnosing disease or promoting democracy.

Among the risks going forward will be the potential impact on the labor force. Several speakers at the AI for Global Good summit urged policymakers to begin preparing the workforce for new jobs in a future that is about human machine collaboration.

Technologists such as Ng have argued for the need to rethink social safety nets, and his preferred option is a conditional basic income, through which people are paid if they are unemployed, with the expectation that they study.

The global development community can be a strong partner in working to ensure that AI benefits everyone, said Ruchit Garg, the founder of Harvesting, which applies AI techniques to satellite imagery to drive financial inclusion for farmers.

This starts with understanding what AI is, how this may or may not work for various sections of society in different settings, creating platforms like this global summit to create dialogue between relevant global players, and finally facilitating standards and guidelines for industry to adopt which can ensure development of AI in [a way that] brings good to humanity in inclusive way, he said.

There is a precedent, he said: The ITU helped define telecommunications industry standards such as 3G, 5G, and Long Term Evolution. The organization could play a similar role in standardizing AI.

Christopher Fabian of UNICEFsaid in an interview at the summitthat he hopes to see development organizations launch partnerships with technology companies, as UNICEF has done with drones and UAVs, to move from conversation to action on AI for good.

If we can help to define some of the greatest needs in the world, and also a path to profit, how business can be involved with those needs, he said, we can create both more consistent and solid businesses but also help those who most need it.

Read more international development newsonline, and subscribe to The Development Newswireto receive the latest from the worlds leading donors and decision-makers emailed to you free every business day.

Read this article:

Artificial Intelligence for Good sees development applications - Devex