A quick read of an article entitled
“Beyond Watson: 3 Techs That Depend On Artificial Intelligence,” written by Lars
Hard, brought some nice points into my head on artificial intelligence. I have
blogged a bit about artificial intelligence and talked about how it won’t get
very, very far, but I do think it has gotten far enough to play a significant part
of our lives. This article shows that it can help with business ventures. It
can be argued that some AI systems have become more skilled than humans. I
still think that AI can only do as much as a human allows them, but most of
mankind does not know how artificial intelligence works. So technically, they
would be more skilled. This means that humans should take advantage if they
can. The following business areas should be paid attention to with regards to
the growth of artificial intelligence.
Hard talks about E-commerce and
product recommendations first. He talks about Amazon’s first generation
collaborative filtering for online recommendations. It would work in the
fashion of “if you bought product A, you will probably like product B” pitches.
The limits on this were that it did this for when you are buying items in large
quantities. What if you were buying a high priced item? You would probably only
get one and that is what made this filtering tough. Enter artificial
intelligence and you have the second generation of filtering for
recommendations. It expanded the searches and made them more advanced so that
recommendations can be focused on what specific features they looked for.
Taking advantage of this can help
retailers so they can work their product databases better. Artificial intelligence
can gather information from multiple data streams across the e-commerce sites
so they can recommend relevant items to customers. It is now looking past the statistical
correlations and looking further into it. I think this would be an interesting
area to investigate.
Hard talks about vertical search
next. Vertical search is mainly used in areas from travel and electronics to books
and films. They go directly to a site like IMDB rather than through a general
engine like Google. It uses semantics, text classification, feature extraction
and advanced big data analytics mixed with other AI algorithms. It has got to
the point where Google even feels the need to respond and create some vertical
searches. Google hasn’t fully responded yet so it would be best to get a leg up
on them now. To take advantage of this, consider making vertical search pools
plentiful, narrowly focused and well-stocked with content. These AI
technologies can make vertical searches more intelligent than a Google search.
Hard ends with talk on virtual
assistants. Smartphones are growing and they are not stopping. We know of some
of the more popular virtual assistants like Siri and Google Now. They are not
there yet, but they are supposed to work in a better function for the user to
really feel they are interacting with the user. Apple is working on improving
Siri now and wish to get a leg up on the competition for the best virtual
assistant. The best way to take advantage of this is to watch how they grow.
Creating APIs will keep in mind the goal of developing long-term, intimate
relationships with customers.
The smarter an app or platform is,
the more predictive it can be and this is what the consumer will ultimately
want. They want items that can do things for them if they are smart enough to
do so. Watching how AI grows and moving along with it will help in business
ventures.
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