Artificial Intelligence for Business

Preface

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become so ingrained in our daily lives that most people knowingly leverage it every day. Whether interacting with an artificial “entity” such as the iPhone assistant Siri, or browsing through Netflix's recommendations, our functional adoption of machine learning is already well under way. Indirectly, however, AI is even more prevalent. Every credit card purchase made is run through fraud detection AI to help safeguard customers' money. Advanced logistical scheduling software is used to deliver tens of millions of packages daily, to locales around the world, with minimal disruption. In fact, the e-commerce giant Amazon alone claims to have shipped 5 billion packages with Prime in 2017 (see businesswire.com/news/home/20180102005390/en/). None of this would be possible on such a grand scale without the advances we have seen in AI systems and in machine learning technology over the last few decades.

Historically, these AI systems have been developed in-house by skilled teams of programmers, working around the clock at great expense to employers. This reality is now changing. Companies like IBM, Google, and Microsoft are making AI capabilities available on a pay-as-you-go basis, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry. For example, each of these companies provide speech-to-text and text-to-speech services to easily build voice interfaces for pennies per use. This is opening the door for smaller companies with less disposable capital to ...