Depending on who you talk to, AI will either enable massive productivity gains from your employees or replace them entirely.
All the debating aside, AI is coming, and companies need to understand how to harness it.
Seth Earley, founder and CEO, Earley Information Science, focused on the rise of AI during his session, “No AI Without IA,” at Data Summit 2019.
The sixth annual Data Summit conference is being held in Boston, May 21-22, 2019, with pre-conference workshops held on May 20.
Despite the promise of “plug and play” technology, real AI requires varying degrees of information architecture (IA), knowledge engineering, product and content architecture, and high-quality data sources to be effective.
Artificial Intelligence is an evolution of technologies that have been around for decades, Earley explained.
Artificial Intelligence requires a solid foundation in information management principles. Knowledge engineering can produce ROI today while preparing for an AI future.
“You can’t automate a mess and you can’t automate something you don’t understand,” Earley said.
To solve the problems today, businesses will also be prepared for the future, he said.
Text Analytics, a long time staple of content management, is now called “AI.” When businesses are looking at vast knowledge, we need something to make sense of that knowledge, according to Earley.
Personalization has been the big promise for the past 15 years. The problem is that this vision is still a long way from reality.
“Why do we suffer from information overload, we suffer from filter failure,” Earley said.
This requires product data maturity, knowledge engineering, content optimization, and customer experience.
AI-driven personalization requires:
· Meaningful knowledge and content assets
· Analytics to understand and model customer behaviors
· Consistent architecture across product information, customer and content models
· Knowledge of problems to anticipate needs
“Training data” is the biggest challenge to artificial intelligence program development. The knowledge that artificial intelligence driven bots need is the same knowledge that humans need. By building knowledge management programs to support employees, the organization is preparing for improved access through emerging AI and Bot technologies, Earley said.
Many Data Summit 2019 presentations are available for review at https://www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2019/Presentations.aspx.