Self driving car, BOT and chatbot, IoT, machine learning and NLP are becoming terms that know less and less about the future and more and more about the present. It’s only just beginning, but AI, artificial intelligence, is persistently animating the pages of newspapers and many business conversations. Although all the greats of technology from Google to Apple to Uber are working on self-driving onomobiles, it often goes unnoticed that the latest generation cars have the ability to control lane departure, park themselves, overtake and accelerate/brake based on the behavior of other cars on the road. For independent driving, there are still a few steps to be taken, especially in terms of dealing with unforeseen events, but it is certainly not something very far away, Tesla docet.
The newspapers, as well as telling us daily about the latest patents (and the latest disputes) on self-driving, mainly talk about all-rounder speakers such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home or Apple HomePod. They tell us about a future, still a handful of years away, where with our voice we will govern many of the things we do today with a finger and a smartphone… and even more. It’s easy to get distracted and fall into the trap of thinking that AI is still a long way off or worse still it’s just a minor technological toy.
AI requires companies to come up with a new way of thinking: how to design the customer experience and how customers interact with the brand; rethink the i production processes with a view to industry 4.0 but not only; redesigning the products we put on the market. The applications of artificial intelligence do not end with the automation, the customer experience and the efficiency/operational effectiveness but they are certainly a good place to start.
The automation is the easiest to imagine, especially when applied to production processes. There are obviously many opportunities in the 4.0 industry, but automation also means, if not above all, rethinking and evolving the business model and products: Uber, which we all know as the bitterest rival of taxi drivers from around the world, invests in independent driving not so much to apply it to cars, where there will certainly be benefits, but to apply it to trucks and trucks to become a logistics distribution company, a courier 4.0. Virtual assistants, BOTs and chatbots offer the opportunity to manage the relationship with the customer 24 hours a day but also offer a phenomenal opportunity to build a user experience highly innovative, personalized and easy to learn: the challenge, of course, is to do it well and express yourself with the language of the customers, otherwise the effect is the opposite. Recommendations based on big data, just like Netflix in proposing new films, exploit the economy of the community, like Google Maps, which uses all of our phones to monitor traffic in real time and alert other users to potential queues, and of course dialogue as the main interaction, written or verbal. Through Assisted Reality (AR) artificial intelligence can increase the quality on an assembly line by indicating to the operator the correct way to proceed or support us humans in all those operations that require to follow a procedure (and therefore lend themselves to the error of distraction), be it the installation of an air conditioner or a coronary bypass.
For Robur’s Albatros, the powerful airplane / helicopter / missile / submarine / car imagined over a century ago by Jules Verne, there is still time. For everything else, although still embryonic, the artificial intelligence revolution is much closer than you might think. Better to equip oneself.
