
Daily Archives: April 18, 2019
AI Knowledge Map: How To Classify AI Technologies
Is Google AI Aggressive or Cooperative? Depends on the Circumstance
Placing humans at the centre of Artificial Intelligence
At birth, we humans are helpless. We spend about a year unable to walk, about two more before we can articulate full thoughts, and many more years unable to fend for ourselves. We are totally dependent on those around us for our survival. Now compare this to many other mammals. Dolphins, for instance, are born swimming; giraffes learn to stand within hours; a baby zebra can run within forty-five minutes of birth.
Across the animal kingdom, our cousins are strikingly independent soon after they’re born. On the face of it, that seems like a great advantage for other species – but in fact it signifies a limitation. Baby animals develop quickly because their brains are wiring up according to a largely pre-programmed routine. But that preparedness trades off with flexibility.
Now imagine a technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses an associative data index that shapes itself by the connections that exists in the data. Instead of arriving with everything wired up by a developer for the pre-canned business questions, it knows the connections in the data and allows users to explore the data from any directions and perspectives based on their intuition. This would provide companies with huge flexibility and advantage because every day they have a new business question, and with the “livewired” data, they can explore it and gain unexpected insights. Read More
What’s Your Data Strategy? — Offensive vs Defensive
More than ever, the ability to manage torrents of data is critical to a company’s success. But even with the emergence of data-management functions and chief data officers (CDOs), most companies remain badly behind the curve. Cross-industry studies show that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions—and less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not, and 80% of analysts’ time is spent simply discovering and preparing data. Data breaches are common, rogue data sets propagate in silos, and companies’ data technology often isn’t up to the demands put on it.
Having a CDO and a data-management function is a start, but neither can be fully effective in the absence of a coherent strategy for organizing, governing, analyzing, and deploying an organization’s information assets. Indeed, without such strategic management many companies struggle to protect and leverage their data—and CDOs’ tenures are often difficult and short (just 2.4 years on average, according to Gartner). In this article we describe a new framework for building a robust data strategy that can be applied across industries and levels of data maturity. The framework draws on our implementation experience at the global insurer AIG (where DalleMule is the CDO) and our study of half a dozen other large companies where its elements have been applied. The strategy enables superior data management and analytics—essential capabilities that support managerial decision making and ultimately enhance financial performance.
The “plumbing” aspects of data management may not be as sexy as the predictive models and colorful dashboards they produce, but they’re vital to high performance. As such, they’re not just the concern of the CIO and the CDO; ensuring smart data management is the responsibility of all C-suite executives, starting with the CEO. Read More
