2018-08-08
几十年来，人工智能（AI）被视为一个“未来”的概念，也许公司是时候做些真正的投资了。
埃森哲公司（Accenture）最近的一项调查显示，85％的企业高管计划在未来三年大力投资于与人工智能相关的技术。根据该报告，大部分投资将集中在主要的业务流程，以支撑公司的财务和会计、营销、采购和客户关系活动。
在经过多年的预测和猜测（更不用说不计其数的科幻故事、电影和电视节目）之后，人工智能终于要成为一项不可或缺的现实技术了吗？
IBM Watson首席架构师鲁奇尔�普瑞（Ruchir Puri）当然这样认为。普瑞指出：“在各行业的企业和各垂直市场中，人工智能技术可以广泛应用于前端、中端和后端办公流程。人工智能的能力，如对话、视觉和语言技术，可以用来解决一系列实际的企业问题，提高生产力，促进各个领域的新发现。”
埃森哲应用智能公司首席技术官让-吕克�彻斯特兰（Jean-Luc Chatelain）发现，在高科技行业，人们强烈地感觉到人工智能即将跨越鸿沟并成为企业转型技术。“已经有证据表明人工智能的影响力，它在医疗和生命科学等领域的影响力将会更大，如促进乳腺癌检测或个性化药物开发等。”
纽约大学斯特恩商学院的教授瓦森特�达哈（Vasant Dhar）表示，只要有数据存在，人工智能就可以投入使用。他解释说：“人工智能可用于客户服务、市场营销、规划、收集新客户或资产等。”
根据IBM的一项研究，世界上80％的数据不在网络上，而是在企业内部闲置。普瑞说：“今天，大多数组织只能够探索这些‘隐藏’数据的一小部分。”人工智能是解锁隐藏资源的关键。
达哈指出，人工智能为企业提供了三个基本的好处：从数据中持续学习，改进决策并使其更加一致，提高运营效率并降低成本。
审计、税务和咨询公司Grant Thornton的市场、客户和行业全国管理合伙人尼科尔�约旦（Nichole Jordan）指出，在提高速度、准确性、可用性和可审计性的同时，人工智能还可以降低成本。她表示：“任何涉及结构化数字数据和业务规则的过程都将受益。人工智能还可以协助前台功能，如通过聊天机器人和移动消息与客户交互，以解决常见的客户问题。”
戴尔EMC公司人工智能战略的首席技术专家赛德�塔贝特（Said Tabet）认为，人工智能在安全应用方面的前景非常光明。他指出：“多年来，基于人工智能的模式识别技术已应用于各种IT和网络安全应用中，主动管理系统性能或阻止安全威胁。这些能力只会越来越普遍。”
凤凰城大学信息系统与技术学院的执行院长丹尼斯�博尼拉（Dennis Bonilla）说，人工智能还能够提高各种基本和重复任务的效率。他表示：“这使得公司可以将更多的资源分配给那些需要电脑无法实现的更高水平创造力的人和项目。”博尼拉认为使用人工智能处理重复任务的企业将会快速发展。
他说：“随着新平台的建立，以及个人和企业掌握创建和利用人工智能的必要技术，企业将部署越来越多的人工智能技术。”
人工智能可以自动执行所有常规功能，还可以帮助工人提高生产力和效率，增强工人的力量和灵活性。Cogito公司首席执行官约书亚�菲斯特（Joshua Feast）建议说：“初始人工智能项目应该部署在增强人类表现和帮助人们工作的领域，从而展示人工智能的价值，同时减轻员工对被替代的恐惧。”
展望未来，彻斯特兰认为，人工智能将带来一种新的智能产品，如自我修复软件和自动驾驶车辆，以及向用户学习并迎合他们偏好和需要的“生活服务”。
普瑞说：“人工智能已经不再是一项‘还不错’的技术了，它正在成为企业工具库中的重要组成部分。大规模部署人工智能技术的企业将大大提高生产力，使员工能够处理更复杂、更具创造性、影响更大的任务，开辟全新的探索和发现途径。”
根据约旦的说法，业务流程改进可以通过几个指标来衡量，比如降低人员成本，提高速度、准确性、质量、可重复性、可用性、可审计性和生产力。“机器人不休假、不生病，也不休息。”她打趣地说。
菲斯特建议说：“实施人工智能所带来的改进应该通过对当前绩效进行基准测试，然后与人工智能部署后进行比较来测量。”
例如，在销售和服务中心部署人工智能时，要测量客户感知并改善人工智能技术的交谈行为指标，如在人工智能技术部署之前和之后测量处理时间、首次呼叫处理结果、客户满意度、员工满意度等常用指标。“这种比较将使企业能够看到人工智能对其业务成果的具体影响。”菲斯特说。
博尼拉指出，企业还必须评估人工智能对面向客户的产品和服务的影响。“人工智能是否以任何方式损害了客户对产品的忠诚度？”他问道，“例如，人工智能聊天机器人已经出现很长时间了，但是在涉及到客户服务时，人工客服是最棒的。”
对于计划使用人工智能的企业来说，第一步是确定该技术能够对企业的哪些领域产生最大的影响。菲斯特解释说：“一旦公司确定了这些领域，他们就可以与著名的学术机构、领先的技术供应商和行业分析师合作，更好地了解可用的人工智能技术，并将其部署在可以轻松测量的受控环境中。”
约旦说，企业应该采取主动的方法，即盘点当前的服务，了解人工智能技术能够如何改善它们。她补充说：“他们还应该评估人工智能可以帮助或加强哪些内部手动重复流程，以便更好、更快地为客户服务。”
要想充分利用人工智能的潜力，企业领导人必须能够清晰地表达自己的目标和期望，然后准备正确的工具、数据和人才。普瑞解释说：“另外，在部署人工智能技术之前，检查企业中是否有人已经在使用人工智能，因为跨部门的协作可以节省时间。”
确定人工智能功能可以应用的业务流程需要想象力，实施基于人工智能的创新需要专业知识。塔贝特说：“企业可以从小规模开始，首先将人工智能技术应用于非关键操作的各种工作流程，提高其效率。”检查已经实现部分自动化的工作流程也是一个好主意。“人工智能是否可以把这个流程从部分自动化升级为完全自动化？”他问，“这样做有何好处？”
为了避免因人工智能内在的复杂性而陷入困境，许多企业选择“AI即服务”（AI-as-a-service），在图像识别和自然语言处理等领域使用产品化的现成API和AI应用程序。彻斯特兰说：“试验这些经过验证的实际应用，以展示人工智能的潜力，做好失败的准备并继续前进。”
博尼拉认为投资人工智能几乎没有任何缺点，而且潜力巨大。他说：“如果企业跟不上技术的发展，就会落后于竞争对手——这一直是事实。”
怀疑论者很快指出，人工智能将消除传统的工作，但这并不全面。博尼拉说：“人工智能还将创造一些目前不存在的工作，但对于企业、教育机构和政策制定者来说，这是一个抽象的概念。企业面临的挑战是协同工作，确保这些工作出现时员工能够胜任。”
即使事情进展顺利，对人工智能的信任始终是一个问题。塔贝特说：“其中一个因素是人性，另一个因素是人工智能技术在我们生活和工作中的新颖性。在非关键业务领域进行成功的试验有助于打消怀疑。他补充说：“持续教育、概念验证和演示有助于加强和说明公司的人工智能战略。”
随着人工智能接受程度的提高，IT和企业领导人需要摆脱自身的变革阻力。彻斯特兰说：“他们需要成为人工智能所带来的变革的推动者。”他指出，人工智能正在迅速发展，企业需要密切关注技术和市场的发展。他指出：“在全球范围内，有关人工智能主题的报告发布速度超过其他主题。关注学术界和最新的人工智能研究肯定会得到回报。”
12/26/2017
08:00 AM
After decades of AI being viewed as a "future" concept it may be time for companies to invest real dollars for real applications.
A recent Accenture survey found that 85% of business executives plan to invest heavily in AI-related technologies over the next three years. Most investments, according to the report, will be in major business processes, underpinning a company’s finance and accounting, marketing, procurement, and customer relations activities.
Could it be possible that after years of forecasts and speculation, not to mention an endless number of science fiction stories, movies, and TV shows, that AI is finally ready to become an indispensable real-world technology
Ruchir Puri, an IBM fellow and chief architect of IBM Watson, certainly thinks so. "There are many opportunities for AI across front, middle, and back office process, throughout lines of business and within various verticals," Puri noted. "AI capabilities, such as conversation, vision and language technologies, can be used to solve a range of practical enterprise problems, boost productivity and foster new discoveries across any area it is applied to."
Getting down to business
Across the high-tech industry, there's a strong feeling that AI is about to cross the chasm and become a business-transforming technology, observed Jean-Luc Chatelain, CTO at Accenture Applied Intelligence. "There's already evidence of the impact AI has and even stronger evidence of what it will have in areas like healthcare and life sciences, where it could facilitate breast cancer detection or personalized drug development."
Vasant Dhar, a professor at New York University's' Stern School of Business, stated that AI can be put to work wherever data exists. "It could be for customer service, marketing, planning, gathering new customers or assets," he explained.
According to an IBM study, 80% of the world's data is not on the Web, but sitting unused inside businesses. "Today, most organizations only have a capability to explore a tiny fraction of this 'dark' data," Puri said. AI is the key to unlocking that hidden resource.
Dhar noted that AI offers enterprises three basic benefits: the ability to learn continually from data, the ability to improve decision making and make it more consistent, and improving operational efficiency and cutting costs.
AI can play a role in reducing costs while enhancing speed, accuracy, availability, and auditability, suggested Nichole Jordan, national managing partner of markets, clients, and industry for audit, tax, and advisory firm Grant Thornton. "Any process involving structured digital data and business rules will benefit," she stated. "AI can also assist with front-office functions — think customer interactions via chatbots and mobile messaging that are able to address common customer/client questions."
Said Tabet, lead technologist for AI strategy at Dell EMC, sees a particularly bright future for AI in security applications. "AI-based pattern recognition technologies have been employed within various IT and cyber security applications for several years to proactively manage system performance or to block security threats," he noted. "These capabilities will only become more widespread."
AI also promises to improve the efficiency of various basic and repetitive tasks, according to Dennis Bonilla, executive dean of the University of Phoenix's College of Information Systems & Technology. "This allows companies to allocate more resources to people and projects that require a higher level of creativity that computers can’t yet achieve," he observed. Bonilla expects a rapid acceleration in businesses that use AI to handle rote tasks.
"We are seeing AI become increasingly more available to businesses as new platforms are created and people and organizations have more access to the necessary technology to create and utilize AI," he said.
While AI can automate an entire range of routine functions, the technology can also help workers become more productive and efficient, augmenting human skills in terms of strength or dexterity. "Initial AI projects should be deployed in areas that augment human performance and help people with their jobs, hence demonstrating the value of AI while also easing employees’ fears of replacement," recommended Joshua Feast, CEO of Cogito, an MIT spinoff that creates AI and emotional intelligence software.
Looking farther the road, Chatelain believes that AI will lead to the creation of a new class of intelligent products "such as self-repairing software and autonomous vehicles, as well as ‘living services’ that learn from the user and adapt to their preferences and needs.”
Assessing benefits
"AI is no longer a 'nice to have' technology; it is becoming a crucial part of an organization’s arsenal of tools," Puri said. "Enterprises deploying AI technologies at mass scale will gain dramatic increases in productivity, allowing employees to handle more complex, creative and higher-impact tasks, opening entirely new avenues of exploration and discovery."
According to Jordan, business process improvements can be measured through several indicators, such as reduced headcount costs and enhanced speed, accuracy, quality, repeatability, availability, auditability and productivity. "Robots don't take vacation, don’t get sick, and don’t take breaks," she quipped.
"The improvements that result from the implementation of AI should be measured by benchmarking current performance and then comparing metrics after the AI has been deployed," Feast suggested.
For example, when deploying AI within sales and service call centers, to measure customer perception and improve the AI technology's speaking behavior common metrics such as handle time, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction can be measured before and after the AI technology has been applied. "This comparison will allow business to see the specific impacts AI on their business results," Feast said.
Bonilla noted that businesses must also evaluate the impact AI has on customer-facing products and services. "Is the fidelity of your product jeopardized in any way?" he asked. "AI chatbots, for example, have come a long way, but nothing beats a human touch when it comes to customer service."
Getting started
The first step for businesses planning to get started with AI is to look across their organization for areas where the technology can make the greatest impact. "Once companies have identified these areas, they can work with prominent academic institutions, leading technology vendors and industry analysts to gain better insight into available AI applications that can be deployed in a controlled setting where they can also be easily measured," Feast explained.
Businesses should take a proactive approach to AI by inventorying current services to see how the technology might be able to enhance them, Jordan said. "They should also take stock of which internal manual, repetitive processes could be assisted or enhanced by AI in order to better and more quickly serve their clients," she added.
To fully leverage AI's potential, enterprise leaders must be able to clearly articulate their goals and expectations, and then prepare themselves with the right tools, data, and talent. "Separately, it is helpful to check if anyone in the organization is already using AI in some capacity before diving in, as collaboration across silos and business units can save time," Puri elaborated.
It takes imagination to identify unique business process to which AI capabilities can be applied, as well as expertise to actually implement a new AI-based innovation. "Organizations can start small by first examining the various workflows around non-critical operations that could be made more efficient if automated using AI," Tabet said. It's also a good idea to check for instances where partial automation is already happening. "Could AI help take that process from partial to full automation?" he asked. "What could the gains be to go all the way?"
To avoid becoming bogged down by AI's inherent complexity, many organizations opt to tap into AI-as-a-service, using productized off-the-shelf APIs and AI applications in areas such as image recognition and natural language processing. "Pilot these proven practical applications to demonstrate the potential of AI, and be ready to fail fast and move on," Chatelain said.
AI's inevitability
Bonilla sees virtually no downside to investing in AI, but plenty of potential. "At the end of the day, businesses will fall behind the competition if they don’t keep up with technology—that has always been true," he observed.
Skeptics are quick to point out that AI will eliminate traditional jobs, yet that doesn’t tell the whole story. "AI will also create jobs that don’t exist yet, but that’s an abstract concept for businesses, education providers, and policymakers alike," Bonilla said. "The challenge is working collaboratively to ensure workers are prepared to fill these jobs when they’re created."
Trust in AI will always be an issue, even when things are going well. "Part of that is human nature, part of it is still the newness and novelty of AI-based technologies in our lives and workplaces," Tabet said. Successful experimentation and trials in non-critical business areas can help win over skeptics. "Continued education with workshops and hands-on proof of concepts and demos will help reinforce and illustrate the company’s strategy for AI," he added.
As AI acceptance builds, IT and business leaders will need to shake off their natural resistance to change. "They need to become agents of the change that AI will bring," Chatelain said, noting that AI is evolving rapidly and that enterprises need to pay close attention to technology and market developments. "I have rarely seen [technical] papers being published as fast as on AI topics, globally," he noted. "Staying informed and close to academia and the latest AI research will certainly pay off."
附件：
微信公众号