Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
Showing posts with label artificial intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artificial intelligence. Show all posts
What if you could closely measure your retail competitor’s in-store sales every day? What if you could be alerted when competitors were increasing or decreasing production at different factories or ordering more materials? Would that be valuable? If it were possible, how would it change your strategies and the way you operated?
Intelligence capabilities that in the past were available only to nation-states are now available to commercial organizations through services provided by companies like Orbital Insight. They partner with a wide range of satellite and other geospatial data collection companies to aggregate and analyze data, using artificial intelligence and data science to provide near-real-time insights. One of their products monitors over 260,000 retail parking lots from space. They use artificial intelligence to count and measure the number of cars in the lots and analyze time sequences to understand how the number of cars fluctuates over time. This helps them understand if sales are increasing or decreasing in a particular location. Isn’t that crazy to think about? But think about it we should. This is the next generation of business intelligence. Put on your James Bond suit or dress, order a drink, and prepare for the next generation of digital transformation.
Satellite imagery can also help monitor fleets of trucks, warehouse activities, crops, plant health, highway traffic, construction projects and activities, oil field operations and oil storage levels, mines, logging, shipping and much more. It’s important for business leaders to understand what is possible today, and what is being used by other digitally-mature competitors. Intelligence gathering and analysis methodologies first developed by military and intelligence agencies, such as activity-based analysis and patterns of life analysis, will soon be critical skills for businesses.
All of these capabilities are being productized and/or offered as subscription services. What makes it possible? The commercialization of space as a result of massive numbers of new satellites being launched, producing massive volumes of new data, transmitted across incredibly fast wireless networks and then analyzed and interpreted by artificial intelligence.
It is also important to know that satellites support many different types of sensors. They can include infrared thermal sensors to detect different heat signatures. They may include hyperspectral sensors to detect different minerals, terrestrial vegetation and man-made materials. Each new generation of satellite includes new types of sensors capable of collecting new forms of data.
The real insight here is the way combinations of newly-available data sources plus artificial intelligence will make possible new and additional waves of digital transformation. Digital transformation is most certainly a journey not a destination.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Last year the World Economic Forum labeled 2017 as the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What value do we gain from defining industrial revolutions? I believe it is to define new sets of rules for winning in business. Let’s review the three previous industrial revolutions.
Industrial Revolution #1. We move from reliance on animals, human muscles and biomass to the use of fossil fuels and mechanical power. A caveman/businessman wishing for a competitive advantage might be the first to use mechanical power fueled by fossil fuels to build cave-condos faster and cheaper than other Neanderthals.
Industrial Revolution #2. Electricity is harnessed and distributed, both wireless and wired communication is developed, the synthesis of ammonia provides new fertilizers and harvests increase, and new forms of power generation are developed. A farmer wishing for competitive advantages could adopt mobile phones to communicate wirelessly with their workers, use lights around the farm to extend hours of operation, fertilizers could increase their production.
Industrial Revolution #3. Digital systems are developed, communication and rapid advances in computing power achieved, which enable new ways of generating, processing and sharing information. A businessman operating a disco and seeking competitive advantages installs a digital cash register for more accurate cash management, buys an Apple Computer with the VisiCalc spreadsheet to better manage the business, and installs a heavy printer to print disco-oriented newsletters and other business documents from the office.
Industrial Revolution #4. Billions of humans are connected by mobile devices and networks, surrounded by sensors, wearing wearables, supported by unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, which serves as the springboard for developments in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing. A business woman seeking a competitive advantage decides to develop and rent out genetically-altered and custom-designed farm animals with embedded GPS sensors to urban dwellers by developing a mobile app connected to the internet where chatbots take your reservation and deliver the beasts in autonomous self-driving trucks pulling cattle trailers.
What if I told you that consumers are now happy to give up personal information in exchange for quality conversations with robots? Let me provide some context to that question. In my research over the past few months most recent studies show that consumers don't mind giving up their personal details if the value in return is perceived as fair. As evidence, let me reference the extraordinary popularity this year of smart speakers powered by voice enabled digital assistants (VEDAs) such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant. VEDAs enable what Capgemini calls "Conversational Commerce." Conversational commerce is when VEDAs help users shop and buy things through an AI supported voice interface. In order for them to be effective, they capture huge amounts of personal data, and consumers don't seem to mind at all.
In this Silicon Valley Series I have the privilege of interviewing very smart and experienced Silicon Valley veterans on a variety of important business trends, technologies and strategies. I hope you find this series of short interviews interesting. In this episode, experienced Silicon Valley CEO Tom Thimot and I discuss the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation, and how it all plays a role in operating a more precise business that leads to competitive advantages.
In this episode of the Digital Expert Series, we dig deep into the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with AMI Global's expert Terrence O'Leary. We learn about all the various components in the IIoT ecosystem including sensors, analytics, security, AI, machine learning, and the competitive advantages available and the strategies employed.
Read more from the Center for Digital Intelligence™ here:
This month, an AI (artificial intelligence) system passed a medical exam in China for the first time. I wonder how its bedside manner will be? In addition, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia. I wonder if the robot will be granted the rights of males, or females? With all these rapid advancements, I think it is time we explore the spiritual life of robots.
Up until recently, programmers coded and configured algorithms, AI, automation and machine learning system and took personal responsibility for all the code. Today, however, AI has escaped the confines of human oversight and has been empowered and employed to self-program, self-optimize, self-test, self-configure and self-learn. David Gunning writes, "Continued advances [in AI] promise to produce autonomous systems that will perceive, learn, decide, and act on their own." That's a problem, not only with me, but with Karma.
Intelligent Automation is one of the most exciting and fast growing areas in high tech today. Everyday we read, watch and listen about more robots, artificial intelligence, sensors and other innovations. In today's interview with Wipro's Intelligent Automation expert Alex Veytsman, we get to the bottom of the hype and ask the expert what companies are really doing with intelligent automation. Enjoy!
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Have you considered how the traditional textbook author/publisher, teacher, student and parent relationship should change as a result of digital transformation? In this article let's explore how this traditional process can be greatly enhanced with digital technologies. Traditionally a physical textbook is published in one format for all students. Sometimes, at a great expense, they can be translated to another language. There are several challenges with that. Not all students learn in the same manner or language, physical textbooks can only use images and texts on paper, and today's students are more accustomed to accessing, reading, watching and listening to content in a digital format on smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Digital formats, however, can be integrated with all kinds of digital media. The devices or hardware that reads digital formats (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.) also mostly support GPS and mapping. With GPS sensors, authors can integrate location data from Google Field Trips, to make their textbooks location-aware and more contextually relevant to the reader. For example a student could be reading about Lewis and Clark's explorations, and their digital textbook could automatically show them nearby locations, photos, video clips, notes, podcasts, etc., related to that journey. In addition, virtual reality and augmented reality applications could then be created to bring historic events to life.
In this weekly report I collect, curate and comment on interesting topics related to emerging technologies and digital trends. Enjoy!
Question: Why is 2017 a record year for retail stores in the USA? Answer: A record 6,700 retail stores have already closed in the USA in 2017, and as many as 8,600 will close by the end of the year. Online stores are capturing more market share, and fast fashion is overturning traditional retail business models and supply chains. [KRB Comment] This is our fault. We like to shop online. We like access to global inventories and next day shipping. We like to be able to conveniently return products that don’t work for us. We like personalized product offerings. We like recommendations. We like lower prices. We like shopping from our couches and beds. Source:
Question: How do you dupe Americans out of more personal information without their knowledge and then sway an election? Answer: Offer them a free personality test on Facebook, and then use that information to create psychographic data. Cambridge Analytica built psychological profiles of over 200 million Americans in part by using information they shared on social media. For example, many Americans took personality quizzes spread by the firm on Facebook, which were designed to reveal how they score on measures of the so-called “big five” personality traits. [KRB Comment] I am guilty of taking both personality tests and political leanings tests on Facebook. I am now sure the results were ultimately combined to create a profile that could be used for nefarious purposes. I don’t think this is what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind when he first programmed Facebook at Harvard. Source:
In this Silicon Valley Series I was honored to interview a number of very smart and experienced Silicon Valley dignitaries on a variety of important business trends, technologies and strategies. I hope you find this series of short interviews useful. In this episode, I interview Silicon Valley veteran and three time CEO Tom Thimot on how artificial intelligence and automation are evolving from hybrid models to more trusted automation models.
It took Magellan’s crew three years sailing ships to circumnavigate the earth. Today, at hypersonic speeds of 7,680 MPH, it takes just over three hours to circumnavigate the earth. Data on the Internet, however, travels at 670 million MPH, which means it only takes milliseconds to circumnavigate the earth. In this age of digital businesses and digital interactions, companies must digitally transform to work effectively in a world where mass information moves at these unimaginable speeds.
It's not just IT systems that are impacted by the volume and speed of information. The creators of business processes that were designed and developed in an analog area, simply never envisioned a business environment that would require these operational tempos. Analog business processes were designed to have humans involved. These dependencies were designed to slow down the process to ensure accuracy, compliance and accountability. Today, however, operating at the slow speeds of an analog, human dependent business process, will doom your company. Analog business processes must be quickly automated via robotic process automation using artificial intelligence and machine learning to effectively interact with impatient digital customers and B2B partners.
Fingerspitzengefühl: A German word used to describe the ability to maintain attention to detail in an ever-changing operational and tactical environment by maintaining real-time situational awareness. The term is synonymous with the English expression of "keeping one's finger on the pulse". The problem with fingerspitzengefühl traditionally, in addition to pronouncing it, has been it is hard for an individual to scale up. Today that is changing. In a world of sensors, AI and mobile devices, having real-time situational awareness is far easier than ever before. In fact, today the challenge is not how to do it, but what to do with the massive volume of data that can be provided.
W. Edward Deming taught that quality is achieved by measuring as much as possible and reducing variations, and reducing variation is achieved by improving the system, not just pieces. Japan widely adopted Deming's philosophies in the 1950s and became the 2nd biggest economy in the world. Quality improvement didn't decrease jobs in Japan, it increased jobs.
AI now has the ability to expand and codify Deming's philosophies - to take them to the next level. AI can improve and standardize decision making based on logic, rather than the fear of missing objectives, bonuses or losing one's job. It can continuously monitor for quality against specifications by analyzing streams of real-time data coming from embedded sensors connected to the IIoT, IoT and IoA (internet of agriculture). This means companies that are aggressive early adopters of these digital technologies will have more knowledge, higher quality and significant competitive advantages, which means more demand for their products, sales, customer service, manufacturing, distribution, etc. It also means aggressive adopters will likely generate more jobs.
Most of us understand that artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities for productivity improvements in the form of speed, automation, standardized actions and responses, plus the opportunity for continuous improvements via machine learning. These opportunities are enabled by data inputs that are analyzed and processed through AI algorithms that execute a desired decision and action. For all of the great capabilities and benefits that AI can provide, there is also a potential dark side. AI solutions can easily codify our prejudices, bias, gender stereotypes and promote injustices intentionally or unintentionally. This threat, as real and serious as it is, can also be seen as an opportunity to evaluate who we are, what we want the future to look like, and then codify a better tomorrow.
What makes an Industrial Internet of Things platform different from any other IoT platform? How is real-time data treated differently from data that can be archived and analyzed later? What role does AI play in IIoT? All these questions and more are covered in this interview with OSIsoft's Sam Lakkundi. Enjoy!
Read more articles and watch more interviews at C4DIGI.com.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Professor Paul Virilio, a philosopher of speed, urbanist and cultural theorist, wrote at length about the impact of speed on society. He wrote that speed compresses both time and distance. Where once it took a letter 6 months to get to the other side of the world, an email can now arrive in seconds. Today's near real-time communications has changed how nations are governed, markets operate and commerce is conducted. The distance and time involved in communications has been compressed into seconds.
Commanders of Roman armies could once estimate the day and time of battle based upon their soldiers ability to march 20 miles per day on purpose built stone roads. Today, however, a ballistic missile can be launched and reach the other side of the earth in minutes. As a result, nations and their military commanders must now prepare to make critical decisions in mere seconds rather than taking days, weeks or months to deliberate. That's a big deal. In the past, an army could retreat and give up distance for time. In the example of the roman army, an opponent could retreat and separate themselves by 100 miles to give them the security of 5 days of time. Today 100 miles means only a matter of seconds. The distance and time of military conflicts today has been compressed to milliseconds.
I have had the opportunity to work for and around a good many start-ups during the course of my career. Often the start-up founders would simply define a problem, develop a solution and launch a company. The marketing department would then do their very best to identify the individuals in each target company that experienced the problem and had a budget to fix it. This was always a challenging task, but it is even harder today.
Today, start-ups must not only identify a problem that needs solved, but they must compete against "digital transformation" initiatives in both the business and IT organizations that are trying to reduce complexity through the elimination of applications, customized software solutions, IT systems, multiple instances of ERPs and vendors.
The goal of many organizations today is to simplify the IT environment, and to make business processes much faster and agile. I see many companies seeking to standardize on a handful of platforms like Salesforce.com, SAP, Adobe, Ariba, SuccessFactor, etc. Too many systems in an IT inventory, means too much complexity and the increased risk that data will be compromised, and that systems will be too expensive to maintain, secure and upgrade. In this age of fast changing digital consumer behaviors, flexibility and simplicity equal organizational speed to keep up with their markets.
What is the answer for start-ups? Start-up solutions must appeal to the digital transformation goals of their target customers. It means their solution must be cloud based and automatically upgraded to stay aligned with customer's core platforms and systems. It means offering artificial intelligence enabled robotic process automation, chatbots and machine learning that can improve predictability, simplify complexity and eliminate troublesome areas of service and performance. It must not result in any additional layers of complexity, rather new solutions need to solve big problems, while at the same time reducing complexity, and increasing agility and the operational tempo of the business.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes
people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John
Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects
us all.Leaders (people) must become
trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions.Leaders must use the right strategies and
methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the
needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things).If any component of this trinity is weak, it
will be hard to compete.
In a recent survey of high tech VP level and above
executives that I conducted, few companies have a formal training program in
place to help develop their leaders to be skilled at digital transformation and
competitive decision-making.Most
enterprises are just rolling the dice on the skill levels of their leadership.Given the emerging challenges that digital
transformation introduces to a complex business, I would strongly advise
companies to invest in formal digital leadership development.
Some of the key goals of digital transformation are to speed
up and improve interactions with digital customers, and to be able to react
faster to new information.As digital
technologies (things) provide more real-time data, and real-time data analysis,
new strategies (ideas) for making real-time decisions must be implemented by
leaders (people) or their proxies.In
the future, more and more proxies involved in real-time decision-making will be
in the form of robotic process automation systems using artificial intelligence
and machine learning.
Any business process where there is a documented best
practice for how best to respond to various data inputs can be automated.As data inputs become more real-time, human leadership
decision-making becomes the source of latency in the system.I predict that decision-making will increasingly
be a source of competition, and that decisions will soon be divided into those
where there is a defined best option already which allows for rapid automation,
and those that have ill-defined options and require humans' capacity for
creativity to solve.
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
The size of competitors and the longevity of their brands, are less predictive of future success than the quality and speed of their information logistics systems, and their ability to use it as a competitive advantage.
More data is being generated today than ever before, and successful companies are investing in business analytics and big data solutions to mine competitive advantages. There is a new sense of urgency today as businesses realize data has a shelf life, and the value of it diminishes rapidly over time. In an always-connected world where consumers and their needs are transient, timing is everything and a special type of data is needed - real-time data. In order to capture competitive advantages and contextual relevance before data expires, enterprises must deploy optimized information logistics systems (OILS) that deliver on the potential fast enough to exploit it.
Mobile consumers are impatient and demand instant results. IT infrastructures must be able to support real-time mobile and IoT (internet of things) interactions, and this requirement will increase as mobile commerce is predicted to grow to 47% of all e-commerce by 2018. Supporting real-time information requires not only real-time IT environments, but also digital transformation across the entire organization. In order to succeed, businesses must react to location-based and time-sensitive information while it is still contextually relevant.
Data is the lifeblood of e-commerce, mobile commerce and increasingly in physical stores where the digital and physical worlds are rapidly converging. As commerce rapidly shifts online and mobile, the success of products, brands and companies are increasingly dependent on data and systems that consume it in order to support the demand for more personalized digital experiences (Read Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me). How an organization makes sense of data, protects it, and disseminates it is a complex and challenging issue.
Data strategies and the execution of them will determine the market winners of the future, and the future is now. Businesses are learning from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix and others that effective data and analytics strategies are the secret to success in digital markets (Read How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards). Information dominance is now the strategic business goal.
In the book Code Halos, authors Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Benjamin Pring, describe how the revolution today in data and analytic strategies are impacting industry structures in “consistent and violent patterns.” In another recent study, 82 percent of investors and equity analysts believe industries are being disrupted by innovations in data and analytics. They believe these innovations will alter competitive dynamics.
In addition to investments in IT, achieving real-time operational tempos in an enterprise takes rethinking business models, organizational structures and business processes. It requires new ways of operating and employee training. Supporting real-time operational tempos is a daunting task many will fail to prioritize, and will suffer as a consequence.
The winners of a digital tomorrow will invest in four key areas:
Optimizing their information logistics systems
Supporting real-time operational tempos
Increasing business agility
Using contextually relevant data to personalize digital user experiences
The purpose of these investments is to capture the value of data, exploit the meaning, and attract more customers and loyalty through the speed of their enterprise operations. Speeds should be maximized in the following 5 areas:
IT system speeds
Business process speeds
Decision-making speeds
Digital and Business Transformation speeds
Aligning with changing customer behavior speeds
Optimized information logistics systems that support real-time speeds will take advantage of sensors, online interactions and mobile devices to collect data. Sensors can take multiple forms. They can be embedded chip technology that monitors physical and chemical environments and wirelessly transmits digital results, or they can be software code that monitors contextually relevant opportunities, moments and environments (CROME) by reading data inputs collected from all digital sources. CROME triggers are “meaningful bits of data that when captured and analyzed can activate time-sensitive and relevant personalization that can be used to enhance user experiences.”
CROME triggers integrated with real-time artificial intelligence algorithms can transform the potential value of data, into kinetic value by instantaneously personalizing a user’s experience and making it contextually relevant.
Businesses that embrace digital transformation will optimize their organizational structures and business models to support the operational tempos required by a mobile and connected world. By tempos we mean the pace or speed at which the organization must operate to compete successfully. Increasingly mobile and connected device users demand real-time responses. To support real-time responses requires an enterprise to move beyond “human time” and into the realm of “digital time” (Read 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation). Humans as biological entities operate at a pace governed by the sun, moon, and the physical requirements to keep our carbon-based bodies alive. These requirements and mental limitations make scaling humans beyond these time-cycles impossible without augmentation. Augmentation takes the form of intelligent process automation, artificial intelligence and algorithms. These types of augmentation technologies have the advantage of being able to work 24x7x365, and don’t as yet ask for holidays off.
Once an organization is capable of supporting real-time tempos, and can support the personalized interactions mobile users demand, the challenge becomes business agility.
Agility is the speed at which a business can recognize, analyze, react and profit from rapidly changing consumer demands in a hyper-competitive market. Businesses that can accurately understand customer demand and their competition, and then respond faster, will soon dominate those, which are slower. The military strategist John Boyd called these competitive advantages, “getting inside of your competitor’s decision and response curves.” This means your actions and responses are occurring at a pace that surpasses your competitions’ ability to comprehend it.
Businesses must recognize the demand for real-time operational tempos is only going to increase and this requires strategy, action and a budget. The principle of acceleration and mobility states, “As the number of connected devices increase, the demand for digita interactions will exponentially increase, resulting in an even greater need for digital transformation involving business operations, business processes and IT environments.” Delaying a response, or denying the need for these requirements are not winning options.
Sub-optimal information logistics systems, and the glacial operational tempos of yesteryear will not succeed in today’s or tomorrow’s world, and company valuations have already begun to reflect this. One-third of investors and equity analysts surveyed believe that good data and analytics strategies are rewarding companies with higher valuations. Gartner’s Douglas Laney has even coined the phrase infonomics to describe how information, as a new asset class, can be measured to estimate its impact on company valuations.
To succeed in the digital future, CIOs must implement innovative data strategies and information logistics systems capable of winning in a real-time world where contextually relevant, instant and personalized experiences are required. A good new book on the subject of preparing for this new reality is "What to Do When Machines Do Everything." They must develop company cultures where change is viewed as an opportunity. They must digitally transform their businesses to operate at real-time tempos and move beyond “human-time” limitations to algorithm supported “digital-time.” They must understand that rapidly changing digital consumer behaviors mandate companies operate in a more agile manner capable of rapid responses to new opportunities and competitive threats.
I invite you to watch my latest short video on digital technology trends and strategies:
Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, connect with him on LinkedIn or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
I had the privilege today to interview Oracle's mobile and Chat Bot expert, Suhas Uliyar. In this video interview we discuss the four components of Chat Bot development, how they utilize mobility platforms, sentiment analysis, APIs, personalization, decision-trees, AI and much more. Enjoy!
***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
