The idea of artificial intelligence has been severely misrepresented for at least a century since a Czech playwright created the term “robot”. (Some would argue it’s been 250 years, when the Mechanical Turk, a fake automaton that could play chess, wowed Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The trick? Not thousands of intricately plotted gears or punchcards…But someone sitting inside, moving the limbs.) So when you hear that artificial intelligence can improve your business practices, skepticism is a reasonable response.
Machines cannot think (at least when this article is published). What they can do better than humans is sort between options, computing things exponentially faster than human beings. And while the Turing Test and exceptional chess capability are interesting, they are unlikely to help your business.
AI can iterate between potential options faster than any employee you could hire. They can cross-reference data sets for forecasting, applying historical values of sales or catastrophes. Depending on your data sets, you can get rosy predictions or gloomy ones, or iterate to define more likely scenarios. What might’ve taken executives days to chart out in smoky rooms can be done with a few clicks. Because of modern computational theory, the more data you get, the more accurate future predictions become.
Advia Consulting, with its mastery of mechanical prediction, cannot help you with your chess game. (But when in doubt, it’s better to try and control the center of the boards than the corners.) They can save you endless meetings of reconciling spreadsheets, guessing about the results of next quarter. Contact them today!
