What I've been reading w/c 27/03/2017: Chatbots and AI

Chatbots are an interesting example of how supporting technology can be the catalyst for innovation. In this case smartphones with messaging apps, constant fast network connections, and an API economy. All these enable comparatively low-tech chatbots to be viable (even I wrote a production text interface to an asset DB in 2000!). So, it's not new technology that's the innovation, it's combining existing technology in ways that change behaviour.

 This article in the Harvard Business Review is spot on. AI systems much more like employees than traditional IT. Because it "learns" you often can't just lift the data/business rules into a new system. So you need to start thinking about "handover periods" and "training" a lot more. (Also make the jobs-to-be-done framework about hiring tools to do a job much more apt!)

 There is much promise in Artificial Intelligence, this article on what to think about machines that think contains some views around that which don't seem to be common outside academia or TED talks. (So possibly useful for those looking at AI without that academic connection, definitely much more informative than a lot of mainstream press coverage)

 Time to go beyond mobile first to AI first products, different personalities needed for different user experience (UX) that the AI driven product will provide. This needs to be considered up front, in the same way that moving from desktop to mobile needed a mobile first approach. 

 Interesting that from a marketing POV there is a lot of AI technology around but not many integrations in use. Maybe they need some tools like Wrappup?

 Over on Medium a brilliant example of going from technological differentiator to commodity item. Reminds me of a friend's complaint years ago that his hard-won Flash skills were now standard tools. Same thing now with AI, what I learned to hand code is now a cloud-based resource. At least I will have appreciation of how it works (and pitfalls in training ;) 

Finally, Fred Hsu CEO of Agent.ai explains how for SaaS and other tools AI is not only going to change the way we work but also the way our tools and services are priced ... there could be opportunities with both. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CONFERENCE: TTI Summer Forum 2017 – Getting to Grips with GDPR

Image
T his week I was at the Travel Technology Initiative's Summer Forum . The subject was the new EU (and UK!) data protection laws. These are due to come into force in May 2018. It's a large topic where the individual member state's laws and guidance are evolving. There were three main points that I picked up from the presentations. First from Dai Davis , GDPR expert at Percy Crow Davis & Co. His lively presentation talked about how a large part of the change is in how rights communicated. Before this was by "fairness" through registration of usage with a central body. The shift is to transparency by informing individuals directly. This means that the consumer mindset could then shift to match how legislation is framed. For example, with the repetition of many companies holding personally identifiable information now having to inform what they are collecting and how they are processing it. Currently, awareness isn't high and the compensation not high eno...
Read more

On HBX and online education

Image
I have written this blog post as a reflection on what has occupied me a lot in the past 3 months. After finishing my Post graduate Certificate in Technol ogy Manage ment with the O pen U niversity I was looking at what to do next in continuing my education - being a life long learner! I was looking at different online plat forms for interesting courses.  I was looking at sites like Coursera and  Future Learn , when I came across a new extension to Harvard Business School and a course they run called HBX CORe. This one paragraph pitch they provide sums it up pretty well: HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) is a 120-150 hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business from Harvard Business School. CORe is comprised of three courses - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning mod...
Read more

Getting email up and running for side projects

Image
This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by Songeunyoung on Unsplash Rectifying my previous mistake - not building community by using email engagement - has proved to be a learning experience! Since our investment is minimal (and we have no real users yet!) the tools that we use all come with some constraint/trade-off. This next bit explain this is going to be slightly technical ... With Heroku it has surfaced as putting in CNAME records in the root of the domain. With register.ly this then stops us adding any other root records, for example mail servers. Cloudfare has a service that will flatten CNAME records for you into A records so everything plays fits together. So a switch ...
Read more