Is ROI here to stay? Or another overhyped technology?

There is something fundamentally different about AI happening now. I have been following AI for many years ever since I received a degree in the subject back in the days when everyone though AI meant artificial insemination and I was doing a degree in farming. I have watched the hype cycle of AI and the 90s and noughties were a damp squid for AI.

In some ways it was not surprising it bust as computer power was nascent. Take the iPhone – the equivalent computational power would have cost over $50M when I graduated. The pace of modern computer power increase has been blistering. If the car from 1971 had improved at the same rate as computer chips, then by 2015 new car models would have top speeds of about 420 million miles per hour. And they would have doubled again last year. And today data sets are increasingly exponentially. By 2020 it is estimated about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. By way of example my first personal computer I programmed had 0.05% of 1.7Mb. And by the way I’m not that old!

We are entering what has been called an exponential era. Over the past year the media has been saturated with AI and machine learning. Robots will take over our jobs with Bill Gates suggesting that robots should be taxed like employees. Google’s self-driving cars are navigating down 101 in Silicon Valley. AI will revolutionise medicine with just in the past week the talk of computers bettering pathologists’ diagnoses and doctor’s predictions. DeepMind, the Google acquired London AI company for $0.5B, just beat the best at the ancient game of Go. Biometrics allow our fingerprints and eyes to be scanned by our phones. Amazon’s Alexa can recognise our voices and engage in conversations with us. Car Number plate recognition catches speeders on our roads. Virtually every business plan I receive references AI today. Even Sergey Brin of Google said he was “surprised by speed of AI advancements.” And he should know as Google is the world’s largest AI company.

But we should be careful. We should not believe a lot of the hyperbole as espoused by the likes of Elon Must, but we should take it very seriously. AI is an enabler and will impact your business. The question is how? And this is where we are here to help.