by Angela Guess
Michael Schmidt recently wrote in TechCrunch, “Artificial intelligence. It’s dominating headlines with the promise of self-driving cars and virtual assistants becoming more real every day. But despite all the talk around AI, no one seems to really understand what it is or how companies can use it… Many people think of AI as the blending of humans and machines. They’re not far off, but AI is an incredibly broad term — more of an umbrella term, really — that simply means making computers act intelligently. It is one of the major fields of study in computer science and encompasses subfields such as robotics, machine learning, expert systems, general intelligence and natural language processing.”
Schmidt goes on, “Apple’s Siri, Google’s self-driving cars and Facebook’s image recognition software are standard examples of AI. But it’s much broader than that. AI also powers product pricing on Amazon, movie recommendations on Netflix, predictive maintenance for machinery and fraud detection for your credit card. While these applications are all powered very differently and achieve different goals, they all roll up into the umbrella term of artificial intelligence.”
He continues, “From a business perspective, companies wouldn’t simply ‘buy’ an AI solution. Rather, they would likely leverage one or more of the subfields of AI and buy software packages like R, Python, SAS, and MATLAB for statistical analysis. But new technology is pushing beyond traditional statistics, and machines are acting more intelligently than ever — they’re not just doing the analysis, machines are now finding patterns in data and figuring out how systems ‘work’… often without any human intervention.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ Ralph Hockens