Category Archives: Ai

By Jared Lindzon 02.28.17 | 5:55 am

Artificial Intelligence may still be in its infancy, but its already forcing leadership teams around the world to reconsider some of their core structures.

Advances in technology are causing firms to restructure their organizational makeup, transform their HR departments, develop new training models, and reevaluate their hiring practices. This is according to Deloittes 2017 Human Capital Trends Report, which draws on surveys from over 10,000 HR and business leaders in 140 countries. Much of these changes are a result of the early penetration of basic AI software, as well as preparation for the organizational needs that will emerge as they mature.

What we concluded is that what AI is definitely doing is not eliminating jobs, it is eliminating tasks of jobs, and creating new jobs, and the new jobs that are being created are more human jobs, says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte. Bersin defines more human jobs as those that require traits robots havent yet mastered, like empathy, communication, and interdisciplinary problem solving. Individuals that have very task-oriented jobs will have to be retrained, or theyre going to have to move into new roles, he adds.

The survey found that 41% of respondents have fully implemented or made significant progress in adopting AI technologies in the workforce, yet only 15% of global executives say they are prepared to manage a workforce with people, robots, and AI working side by side.

As a result, early AI technologies and a looming AI revolution are forcing organizations to reevaluate a number of established strategies. Instead of hiring the most qualified person for a specific task, many companies are now putting greater emphasis on cultural fit and adaptability, knowing that individual roles will have to evolve along with the implementation of AI.

On-the-job training has become more vital to transition people into new roles as new technologies are adapted, and HRs function is quickly moving away from its traditional evaluation and recruiting functionwhich can increasingly be done more efficiently using big data and AI softwaretoward a greater focus on improving the employee experience across an increasingly contingent workforce.

The Deloitte survey also found that 56% of respondents are already redesigning their HR programs to leverage digital and mobile tools, and 33% are utilizing some form of AI technology to deliver HR functions.

The integration of early artificial intelligence tools is also causing organizations to become more collaborative and team-oriented, as opposed to the traditional top-down hierarchal structures.

To integrate AI, you have to have an internal team of expert product people and engineers that know its application and are working very closely with the frontline teams that are actually delivering services, says Ian Crosby, cofounder and CEO of Bench, a digital bookkeeping provider. When we are working AI into our frontline service, we dont go away to a dark room and come back after a year with our masterpiece. We work with our frontline bookkeepers day in, day out.

In order to properly adapt to changing technologies, organizations are moving away from a top-down structure and toward multidisciplinary teams. In fact, 32% of survey respondents said they are redesigning their organizations to be more team-centric, optimizing them for adaptability and learning in preparation for technological disruption.

Finding a balanced team structure, however, doesnt happen overnight, explains Crosby. Very often, if theres a big organization, its better to start with a small team first, and let them evolve and scale up, rather than try to introduce the whole company all at once.

Crosby adds that Benchs eagerness to integrate new technologies also impacts the skills the company recruits and hires for. Beyond checking the boxes of the jobs technical requirements, he says the company looks for candidates that are ready to adapt to the changes that are coming.

When youre working with AI, youre building things that nobody has ever built before, and nobody knows how that will look yet, he says. If theyre not open to being completely wrong, and having the humility to say they were wrong, we need to reevaluate.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, leaders will eventually need to decide where to place human employees, which tasks are best suited for machines, and which can be done most efficiently by combining the two.

Its a few years before we have actual AI, its getting closer and closer, but AI still has a big problem understanding human intent, says Rurik Bradbury, the global head of research and communication for online chat software provider LivePerson. As more AI software becomes available, he advises organizations to think of those three different categorieshuman, machine, or cyborgand decide who should be hired for this job.

While AI technologies are still in their infancy, it wont be long before every organization is forced to develop their own AI strategy in order to stay competitive. Those with the HR teams, training program, organizational structures, and adaptable staff will be best prepared for this fast-approaching reality.

is a freelance journalist born, raised and residing in Toronto, covering technology, entrepreneurship, entertainment and more for a wide variety of publications in Canada, the United States and around the world.When he's not playing with gadgets, interviewing entrepreneurs or traveling to music festivals and tech conferences you can usually find him diligently practicing his third-person bio writing skills.

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Three Key Skills For Staying Relevant In The AI Economy Forbes As our technological capabilities grow, the list of jobs at risk from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is expanding rapidly from manual and less skilled roles, such as driver and personal assistant, to knowledge worker roles such ...

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Forbes

Amazon, Google, Salesforce And Leading Roboticists On The Golden Age Of AI Forbes The 11th annual MIT Tech Conference, a student-led event organized by the MIT Sloan Tech Club, had exponential technologies as its theme this year. Here's what I learned from the event's morning sessions which covered artificial intelligence ...

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Founder and CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings smiles during a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Feb. 27, 2017.(Photo: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Twenty to fifty years from now, when youre starting to get into some serious AI, Reed Hastings isnt sure whether Netflix is going to be entertaining you or entertaining the artificially intelligent bots.

The Netflix founder and CEO opined on the future during an interview on stage at Mobile World Congress here.

Whats amazing about technology is its really hard to predict, he says. What we do is try to learn and adapt rather than try to commit to one particular view of whats going to happen. And if virtual reality takes off well adapt to that, if it becomes contact lenses that have amazing powers well adapt to that.

Hastings appearance at the mobile industrys signature trade shindig was largely focused on Netflix experiences globally. Last January, Netflix expanded to 130 countries and is now just about everywhere, with one big exception China. About half of Netflixs nearly 100 million streaming members are international.

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The company has been on a roll lately. In January, Netflix (NFLX) easily beat Wall Street earnings forecasts, boosted by international subscribers. The stock is trading at $143.41, not far off its 52-week high.

Hastings discussed the appeal behind the companys international push.

If youre a filmmaker in Spain or Italy youre excited about Netflix because it can give global reach for your film. Hastings said hes seen strong mobile usage throughout Africa, Middle East, Asia.

Indeed, Hastings doesnt think theres anything uniquely American about the Netflix viewer. I dont know if I would call it an American experience. Its on a mobile phone, its on a Samsung TV. Fundamentally, the Internet is the most global medium weve ever seen and were trying to continue to learn how to do things well on the Internet.

Hastings says Netflix is investing heavily around the world on network servers, and improving the connection. Five or ten years from now the quality of Netflix on all of your devices will be just incredible and we dont know exactly what that is. But we know that the Internet is allowing new experiences to get created.

Meantime, Netflix is offering more content with a distinctly international flavor.

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For example, a Spanish show called Cable Girls is a 1920s period-piece about the original women hired to work telephone switchboards in Madrid. The sci-fi series 3% is produced out of Brazil.

We want to give global producers a global audience to entertain, Hastings said.

Netflix spent the first couple of years delivering mostly Hollywood content. Now the company is developing relationships with producers in Turkey, Korea, Japan and elsewhere.

The most surprising thing has been the tastes of people around the world, Hastings says. The story of the Internet is connecting people everywhere, and the role that we play in it is around stories of all types.

And he believes binge viewing appeals everywhere. The original binge view was the novel that you stayed up late to read or read on the beach at your leisure.

The Internet has brought back binge viewing to human beings and its just a much better way than watching a show every week. And youre going to see most linear networks convert to binge viewing, and thats very exciting.

Whats unknown right now is whether the audience binge watching many decades from now will be mostly robot or human.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

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Netflix CEO: Our future audience may be AI lifeforms - USA TODAY

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the startup.

Workfits announcement is underscored by a general uptick in activity around conversational AI for enterprise. Amazons Alexa, perhaps the most enterprise-friendly of the popular conversational tools available today, boasts integrations with companies like Hipchat and Sisense for both team collaboration and data recall. Of course, the reality is that most meetings are not limited to a single conference room and even fewer have an Echo listening in.

Workfits assistant Evalistensin tobusiness meetings and lends managers a helping hand by highlighting important action items.Aside from just coordinating follow-ups, Eva will plug into your CRM du jour to allow for voice-driven updates. This means that you can update the status of a given sale and even pull or update data entries. Workfit integrates with major meeting hosting players like BlueJeans, WebEx and Zoom.

The Workfit platform

Other tools like the recently launched Chorus.ai and Cogitoarerespectively more squarely focused on using AI to boostsales and improvethe effectiveness of customer support. Though Chorus.ai will join conference calls with roughly the same mechanism as Workfit, and both will highlight key action items, Workfit has no problem playing anactive part inmeetings.

In lieu of fading to the background, the team behind Workfit wants enterprise users to lend the assistant a hand by explicitly calling out follow-ups. The workflow might sound unpolished, but the company argues that summarizing key points during a meeting is a best practice, regardless of the presence of an AI, to ensure all human participants are on the same page. Eva will do as much in the background as she can, but has no problem being recognized in the spirit of X.ais personal scheduling assistant Amy.

With consumer AI, if you play the wrong song thats ok, asserts Workfit CEOOmar Tawakol. But wrong info in a pipeline on Salesforce, thats not ok.

Workfit team left to right: Geish, David, Ahmad and Omar

This is the logic behind why the startup is focusing so heavily on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), even bringing on Ahmad Abdulkader, a former leader within Facebooks applied AI group. Though working on ASR in 2017 isnt necessarily sexy, there are some gains to be made by building a system for a specific use case in this situation a lot of meeting language.

When asked about sales, the Workfit team told TechCrunch that they hadnt secured any sales yet and that they still considered it early days. Tawakols previous experience driving data management platform BlueKai to a $400 million Oracle acquisition in 2014 undoubtedly helped streamline the fundraising process. Battery Ventures was an early investor in BlueKai.

From here the team wants individual project managers to lead the charge in driving adoption. Once Workfit sees that a group of users is developing at a given company, it will jump in to try to close an enterprise sale.

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Ai Weiwei To Release 'Epic Film That Humanizes Global Refugee Crisis' - Forbes

What does a billionaire eat when he can have anything? Cheeseburgers, apparently.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and the richest man in the world according to Bloomberg, came back to Reddit today for his fifth AMA. He spoke at length about AI, polio, and politics.

But were still stuck on the cheeseburger thing.

The questions were a predictable mix of depth and frivolity. When asked if he ever used a disguise to go out incognito, Gates said he can get by with just a hat. Redditors joked that this puts him on the same level as most superheroes.

He believes the greatest problem facing the current generation is isolation:

I still wonder if digital tools can help people find opportunities to get together with others not Tinder but more like adults who want to mentor kids or hang out with each other. It is great that kids go off and pursue opportunities but when you get communities where the economy is weak and a lot of young people have left then something should be done to help.

Gates talked most about his desire for social and philanthropic reform. He spoke of the limits of what he can do to improve the world, even with all his money, and how he hopes to eliminate polio in his lifetime.

He was a little vague on certain issues, such as the state of America merely saying hes optimistic in the long run. When asked about the world refugee crisis, he said, The way to avoid refugee problems is to help countries develop by having good health, education and governance.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, he likes vacationing in Australia, and he believes a hot dog is only a sandwich if chopped up on a burger bun.

When asked where he sees himself in 15 years, he said, Hopefully a grandfather. Get on that, Bill Gates kids!

Im Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ask Me Anything. on Reddit

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Bill Gates took to Reddit to discuss cheeseburgers and AI - TNW

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HarperCollins Brings AI To Book Recommendations Forbes Publishers have always emphasized the power of word-of-mouth marketing when it comes to selling books. Booksellers are expected to hand-sell titles to bookstore patrons for this reason, and the shelves are often peppered with "employee recommendation" ...

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