The AI Book

CHAPTER 2What Is AI and How to Make It Work for You

By Terence Tse¹, Mark Esposito² and Danny Goh³

¹Co-Founder and Executive Director, Nexus FrontierTech

²Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer, Nexus FrontierTech

³CEO, Nexus FrontierTech

Let us start with a fact: there is really no intelligence in “artificial intelligence” (AI). If anything, the term has been so overused recently that the hype is reminiscent of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. The problem back then – as now – was that many companies and opportunists were making exaggerated claims about what technology can really do; so much so, that a recent study found that a staggering 45% of companies in Europe claiming to do AI actually operate businesses that have nothing to do with AI.¹

Sure, machines can solve problems. Yet, while they can perform complicated mathematical calculations with a speed that no human can match, they are still unable to do something as simple as visually distinguishing between a dog and a cat, something that a 3-year-old child can do effortlessly. Viewed from this vantage point, AI can at best solve clearly defined problems and help with automating time-consuming, repetitive and labour-intensive tasks, such as reading standard documents to onboard new customers and entering customer details into IT systems. Furthermore, the term “machine learning” is somewhat misleading, as machines do not learn like human beings. They often “learn” by gradually improving their ability and accuracy so that, ...