What is AI?

So many people are still confused as to what AI is and how it can help a business, so I’m going to write up a series of posts to help.

If you as a manager, not even a CIO, don’t understand AI, you will never be able to use it effectively. I’m not suggesting you need to know how to build a car in order to drive it, but you need to know enough to know what your car can do. When cars first came out in the early 1900s they were called horseless carriages. If you still think of a car as a horseless carriage, you won’t be using your car effectively. It took many years for people to start thinking of a car as a car.

You don’t have that time luxury with AI.

AI started out more than 40 years ago as “expert systems” or decision support systems. It was software that could help make decisions, ie it could ask lots of questions and based on a simple “if this” then “do that”. For example it could do credit approvals. “If assets are greater than R1million and credit required is less than 10% then approve the loan.” Over time it become more complex as system designers put in more “If statements” into their code and more criteria were added and computers were fast enough to process hundreds or thousands of those “IF <statement> ELSEIF <other statement ELSEIF <ETC>”

Experts in credit or other subject matter were asked to help draw up a decision tree to ensure the right questions were asked and the right decision was taken.

Of course there were mistakes.

These EXPERT SYSTEMS could be used in other industries and for other purposes, including medical (which tended to scare people) and various industrial processes. If the temperature of equipment exceeded a specific number an alarm would sound. It didn’t take long for computer controlled software to take remedial action, for example add water.

Expert Systems and AI were heavily used for many years, but in more specialised activities. Software and programming techniques kept improving. Computers, CPUs, memory etc also improved in speed and costs dropped. What could not be done 5 years ago is now possible. “Clever” software began making our lives easier. One of the cleverest innovations was your cell phones combined with a GPS and mapping software to direct you to your destination, even taking account account traffic and speed cameras.

Search techniques on the internet became useful. You could type in a word or phrase and find a website that would give you the answer (sometimes).

Apple brought out Siri, Amazon had Alexa and Google assistant also started becoming useful with voice commands “Hey Google, what’s the weather like tomorrow”.

They weren’t perfect and could not recognise all commands.

However since users liked them it was obvious that these systems would continue to improve. As processing power increased and the internet became faster the software could also be greatly improved.

Instead of being able to process one “IF STATEMENT” new software languages could process billions of queries.