What is Artificial Intelligence and How Can it Benefit Your Company?

Every day, we are surrounded by Artificial Intelligence (AI): a chatbot that attends us when we enter a web page, an analytics tool that diagnoses business challenges by ‘studying’ large amounts of data… This technology offers numerous possibilities to individuals and companies.

What is Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence consists of algorithms that perform the same tasks as human brains, such as analysis, answering questions, or learning new skills. These algorithms can be found in applications, virtual assistants, websites, or hardware.

Artificial intelligence algorithms obtain data. Then, they filter, process, and analyze, according to the characteristics of the task. Finally, they generate a response to users.

Artificial Intelligence learns or creates patterns that repeat in each cycle and speed up tasks. Patterns can be counted by the millions, thus avoiding the repetition of certain processes and even human intervention to execute them.

Examples of Artificial Intelligence

There are numerous examples of Artificial Intelligence:

• Chatbots: in education, customer service, ticket booking… Numerous sectors can take advantage of the possibilities of conversational assistants to have a better relationship with their customers.
• Voice assistants: Many homes have one of these futuristic design devices that can play a random list of music or regulate the lighting in the living room, but also memorize and alert us of pending appointments, like traditional diaries… or our memory. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), which we will talk about later, they are able to interpret our words and act. These same assistants are found in our smartphones.
• Predictive content: When we return to an e-commerce after having purchased a product there, we can find personalized recommendations based on that purchase or our search history. The system suggests something suitable for us according to this information. The same pattern is reproduced in VOD or music platforms: the algorithm recommends content based on our app usage information.

Types of Artificial Intelligence

The classification of types of Artificial Intelligence by Arend Hintze, former Professor of Integrative Biology, Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (USA), divides these systems into reactive machines, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-representation.

• Reactive machines: They do not create memories, they only make decisions, in the style of artificial intelligence that play games against humans, such as the classic supercomputer Deep Blue: it knows the pieces and the rules of chess and can anticipate a person’s best moves, but it does not ‘remember’ the past.
• Limited memory: They use small memories when making a decision. For example, an autonomous car, that ‘sees’ objects or people and makes instant decisions about them to avoid an accident.
• Theory of mind: Machines understand that people exist and that they perform actions (thinking, emotions…) that shape their way of being.
• Self-representation: Artificial Intelligence is aware of itself and its past experiences. It is the most evolved type of AI.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Work?

In order for Artificial Intelligence to work, it requires data to feed the system and an algorithm to process it and make the machine perform actions.

When talking about how Artificial Intelligence works, concepts such as machine learning (mentioned above), natural language processing, or computer vision should be mentioned:

• Machine Learning: This is one of the divisions of Artificial Intelligence and is dedicated to making machines learn over time by dumping data or implementing neural networks.
• Natural language processing (NPL): This is the area in charge of making machines understand human speech and generate a conversation with the same characteristics.
• Computer vision: By visualizing many images (static or video), this technology learns patterns that are repeated and perform actions based on them: recognition of human figures, drawing objects with a strong resemblance to real ones.

For its operation or learning, artificial intelligence uses external sources such as connected devices (Internet of Things), which can be used to capture large amounts of very useful data to feed and train the algorithm.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence

Advantages of Artificial Intelligence

Among the advantages of Artificial Intelligence are the following:

• Faster and more accurate decision making, thanks to the analysis of thousands of data. In fact, this makes it possible to eliminate possible human errors.
• Automation of tasks, allowing people to focus on more creative tasks.
• Increased productivity of employees (as they dedicate themselves to other, more efficient tasks) and even of machines, since artificial intelligence predicts future failures and thus helps to maintain them.

Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence

On the other hand, the lack of creativity of machines could be considered one of the main limitations of Artificial Intelligence. As we mentioned before that people would engage in more creative issues with the automation of tasks, many AI systems are still far from offering creative results (design of corporate identities, writing long articles…) or do not offer them at the same level as humans.

Another disadvantage of artificial intelligence is the need for large amounts of data (sometimes millions) and quality data to train the algorithms. However, this can be easily solved by planning for large amounts of data and value.

Ultimately, these potential disadvantages may not exist if dealt with in time and with procedures and tools for data collection and processing.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Your Business

We have explained several advantages of artificial intelligence. All of them serve to a company’s advantage.

By applying algorithms, the company and employees are more productive and focus on better tasks, which translates into greater economic benefit. At the same time, by automating tasks, money is saved in the execution of these tasks.

Moreover, the use of AI-powered analytics tools helps to detect new business opportunities or other interesting corporate data, and to share them between different units of the company. As a result, the company receives an extra boost to further pursue its success.

If you have understood the importance of artificial intelligence, we can help you to implement it in your company.

At Plain Concepts we support you to make sense of your data sources: with our artificial intelligence background, we are able to create applications that give more productivity and boost the company.

We work with machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, or cognitive services to add to your services (voice, language, vision…). Write us and we will explain to you how to squeeze all the possibilities of artificial intelligence in numerous utilities.