The Move from Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Intelligence
As we move beyond artificial intelligence, we will begin to talk about augmented intelligence. Augmented intelligence is resulting in adaptive systems and intelligent tools which can be applied or used to facilitate the jobs carried out by people.
While augmented intelligence, like artificial intelligence before it, may take some tasks away from people, this blog will look at what this will mean for the role of human beings and the potential value of augmented intelligence. The advent of augmented intelligence is happening market by market, with these industries among the first to see its impact:
The financial sector
In commercial markets, traders are moving away from watching the market, plugging data into their models and executing trades. Instead, traders are overseeing the intelligent systems and components that are spotting trading opportunities and will make those trades. This is freeing traders up to help guide and define what makes a ‘good’ trade and help to develop the rule-base that the intelligent systems are using to evolve different strategies and adopt different approaches. Traders are therefore moving away from execution and, instead, taking on more strategic and less tactical roles.
Increasingly, the intelligent systems are not only handling the execution, but they are also spotting opportunities and providing tools and capabilities that make it easier for traders to see these. This is taking strategies that were once the realm of highly specialised teams and making them widely available to the trading community.
This is something that we have already seen across more strategy-driven trading institutions, such as hedge funds, and means that highly quantitative, analytical trading strategies are being more commonly adopted as organisations don’t need a team of highly qualified people building models to identify opportunities. As a result, it’s much easier to have highly intelligent adaptive systems that are supporting people who don’t have specialised analytical skills to use those tools and techniques to support day-to-day trading activity.
Software development
As software tools become more intelligent and get more capabilities built into them, we are we are seeing fewer people writing low-level code that creates the fundamental building blocks for IT systems and more people are assembling pre-built components in ways to meet novel demand. What we are seeing is the way in which these pre-built components operate provides more intelligent capabilities, and consequently make it easier and faster for people to build systems that incorporate those capabilities.
Rather than having a team of data scientists on tap to build augmented intelligence models, for example, it’s becoming easier to have components that you incorporate into a data workflow which will automatically construct models to perform certain functions, such as the de-identification of data.
The potential of augmented intelligence
Augmented intelligence has the potential to help businesses and industries realise even greater value, particularly in businesses that use engineering and development processes where it is important to get things right the first time.
In these situations, there are big costs involved with going beyond modelling and design, into the production stages and getting it wrong. Particularly if the business is making tangible goods and there are tooling costs associated with those goods, which means the cost of getting it wrong is high. Therefore, as augmented intelligence helps people produce better quality products and performs a number of checks to ensure they are right, it drastically improves the likelihood of getting things right the first time and, as a result, reduces the cost of bringing new or changed products to market.
Augmented intelligence has a great deal to offer and we are only just scratching the surface of what it can bring to society and organisations. The ability to really shorten the decision-making process and bring more appropriate information and present it in a more timely manner in a way that hasn’t been possible to date will revolutionise the way in which society operates.
Read more from Jon Payne here on the topic of AI on Digitalisation World and Compare the Cloud.
