Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 8The Dream vs. Reality

You envisioned an automated ecosystem full of intelligent machines helping your customers and helping one another. It was going to integrate with your existing systems. Your users were going to love the experience so much that conversion rates would jump through the roof. Processes that were a huge time-suck for your team were going to be automated, freeing them up to focus on growing your organization instead of maintaining the status quo. You thought it would be easy.

The ice-bath reality is that creating an intelligent digital ecosystem requires more than just a few machines thrown at a few different problem areas. Many of the platforms for enabling these ecosystems require a team of experts (developers, data scientists, AI scientists, architects) to build solutions. Coding these solutions can involve significant infrastructure efforts. Even building a relatively simple, production-ready conversational AI application can require hundreds of man-hours across several departments along with significant infrastructure development. Some may not require coding or infrastructure development but are fairly inflexible as a result.

If you've still got chills from your first attempt at AI-enabled automation, you might be hesitant to reboot or even restart the process. But, as I've stressed, you're already in this race whether you want to run it or not. Getting back to the starting line requires assessing your current position. Let's say you already have ...