Saturday 28 November 2015

Artificial Intelligence can take away a lot of knowledge workers’ jobs tomorrow. Are you listening?

Although we are still quite far from mimicking human brain exactly in the laboratories, with all its cognitive abilities, analytical abilities and inter-play of complex emotions in decision making, there are quite a few remarkable progresses in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies which have potential to eradicate thousands, if not millions, of jobs worldwide.
Heard about Amelia? She’s just a software but looks good too!
For example IPSoft’s Amelia, an AI platform, when deployed, works as a cognitive knowledge worker alongside its human colleagues. Amelia works like a service desk employee who can read, listen to and understand what people ask. She can even understand what people are feeling when they ask for services.
Amelia could be deployed to a broad range of business functions. Using Amelia, it is possible to automate various business processes. She has cognitive abilities and learns like a human being. She can solve service requests or queries using her knowledge just as her human colleagues can do. Amelia is smart and intelligent. She can interact with humans as their feeling to deliver a satisfactory experience to those looking for services or calling her for some queries.
Meet IBM’s Watson (well, it’s still waiting to get human identity like Amelia)
IBM’s Watson is smart and intelligent. It can answer complex questions posed by a customer, can very quickly run through a large amount of structured and unstructured data and extract key information, learn patterns, analyse data for forecasting trends, and build insights, better and faster than humans in many cases.
Of course, Watson is a cognitive computing system which mimics certain functions of human brain. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand customer queries, analyse data and build insights from information. Watson can be used in a wide range of business functions and industries.
So, looks like a lot many knowledge workers such Analysts, Brand Managers, Customer Service Professionals and others going to lose their jobs in the future.
Well, may be or may not be.

You got to understand the future and decide for yourself.