Artificial Intelligence 101

The process of innovation is highly disruptive as it turns old technologies obsolete. Emerging technologies have a large potential to transform the lifestyle and living standards of people and the business operating models of companies all over the world.

It becomes important to study both the capabilities and limitations of machine intelligence and its potential impact on human life. Take Artificial Intelligence, for instance, which is a 60-year-old technology whose impact is only just being felt presently by businesses across the world.

Today’s business processes take more and more data sources into account, which has been made possible by modern IT technology.

The data is mapped to a model, aggregated, condensed, and analysed to predict some aspect of the future. For example, the prediction in the mortgage approval process tries to anticipate the likelihood that a customer can pay down a loan.

Based on the prediction, a decision is made and one or several actions are taken. For example, if the creditworthiness of the customer is predicted as solid, then the loan is approved, an account opened, the money transferred.

Historically, humans have been responsible for the activities that drive the process from data gathering via prediction and decision making to selection of the action(s) to be executed.

AI can be embedded in business processes to support humans by intelligent agents or to drive humans out of the process and replace them by fully automated solutions.