Article: Artificial Intelligence: What does your 2016 Playbook look like?

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Artificial Intelligence: What does your 2016 Playbook look like?

The applications of Artificial Intelligence and use cases are baffling if you will just look at the kind of start-ups and products coming out today. Heres what you should know
Artificial Intelligence: What does your 2016 Playbook look like?

Recently CB Insights chimed in with an interesting story around how Google, Twitter, Intel and Apple are in A Rush to Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups. Forbes India came out with this story that showcased how Sundar Pichai is aiming to reinvent the world's second-most-valuable company and pretty much every digital experience - with a heavy dose of Artificial Intelligence. Harvard Business Review came up with this piece that talked about How Companies Are Benefiting today from “Lite” Artificial Intelligence applications. 

Artificial intelligence clearly seems to have taken the cake in 2016. The applications of Artificial Intelligence and use cases are baffling if you will just look at the kind of start-ups and products coming out today. Let’s consider a few that seem to make great use cases in today’s scenario: 

Rich Insights based on People’s Tone of Voice, Facial Expresses and Nuances of Word Choices 

Case in point Botanic. Botanic is a product design firm specializing in conversational interfaces. In other words, they design and build products which are capable of understanding and responding to human speech. They do this by crafting conversational characters who act as an interface. Botanic’s argument is that people’s actions are better predicted in the context of their feelings and attitudes than through text alone. They hence help their customers capture users’ tone of voice, facial expressions, and nuances of word choice. Basis this, they’re able to truly collect, analyze and present their customers with rich insights based on artificial intelligence. 

AI that wants to read your mind and run your life

Meet Viv: the artificial intelligence company that wants to help you live your life with extreme ease. The team that runs Viv was the team that built the Apple powered Siri. According to them, Siri was just the first step in terms of automating quick mundane tasks that you could ask your phone to do. They realized that the applications of a voice-controlled personal assistant could be much bigger when instead of just your phone, they could be linked to all your devices - that will take care of your every need. Picture this: you need to take a flight from Bangalore to Delhi. For this you need to book a cab from your house to the airport, find your ticket, print it, check in at the airport, take the flight, land, book a cab again from the airport to your hotel / client premises in Delhi and finally arrive. Imagine a day wherein you don’t even have to tell you device you need to travel. It already has your ticket and basis your ticket and calendar entries, builds a workflow for you and says it will book a cab via your preferred app so as to estimate traffic via a Maps application to ensure you get to the airport in time. It will check whether your flight is on time or not and automatically update you. Further, when you land in Delhi it automatically books a cab for you. While you exit the airport – your cab is already waiting for you – all just in time. The possibilities that Artificial intelligence brings are endless and Viv could well be a big story should it play its cards right. 

A Personal Assistant that Schedules Meetings for You: Without the Need of an App! 

Given the macroeconomic environment today, the investment climate, the mushrooming of startups with game changing business models that are throwing giant enterprises on the back foot, the need for all of us is to be at our productive best. The only limiting factor to growth today – is time. In comes Clara, to solve precisely this problem. Clara is a human interface: an employee you can depend on. Imagine a world where without hiring someone and paying them full time to be your executive assistant to get everyday stuff done, meeting scheduling and the likes, you have an artificially intelligent bot to do this for you. Without the need to download / use an app – it magically syncs with your calendar and email and gets stuff done. 

Firms that crack processes, algorithms, technologies that appeal to the human emotion will enable true transformation 

So you ask, how does all this boil down to Human Resources? Think about the application of each of the above scenarios in our daily lives. Think about how workflows can be automated that will be driven in efficiency and scale not just at process levels, but drive consistent, scalable business results. Think about how people will be able to park all their routine tasks and use the time that they save to innovate, do what they truly want to do. Think about the applications these could potentially bring to recruiting, to learning and development, about how compensation structures are defined, benchmarked right down to the wire of an individual at the same time contribute to building the very function of an enterprise.  In the recruiting world, Talent Leaders are already seeing a seismic shift in terms of talent attraction from recruiting models moving from the been there, done that inbound, to now razor sharp hyper focused and strategic outbound. Solutions like Belong that leverage predictive analytics and machine learning are built on the backbone of artificial intelligence that use time series data to help organizations make recruiting decisions that improve their Quality of Hire Scorecards. Think about how CHROS and Talent Leaders will now have a single-minded agenda of truly being people enablers and championing empowerment. Welcome to 2016 ladies and gentlemen! Have you figured out your Artificial Intelligence Play yet? 

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Topics: Technology, #TechHR2016

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