Which AI companies or tools are on the cutting edge of the industry?
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Interactive voice response (IVR) tools have improved but they're still so terrible that I often find myself saying, "Representative, representative, representative," because I've spent enough time trying to get it to do what I want it to do. It reminds me so much of the evolution of many things in IT that have always promised to remove the need for a human in between, like the very early in-car navigation systems that you could speak to. If you said, “Navigate to Apple's headquarters,” then the system’s response was, "You want me to call apple? Sorry, I don't have that number." You were trying to get it to recognize you rather than having it spend that time helping you. It got so frustrating that a lot of people didn't use it. Arguably, we're still in that space. When I tell my car to do something, half the time it doesn't actually know what to do, no matter whether I've been in a Tesla, Toyota, Jaguar, etc.
Moveworks and Espressive may not be perfect examples of AI, but they're definitely going further than ServiceNow in helping to automate tasks in the service management space. I'm not an operator anymore, so I'm sure there are many other examples but that's what I've been working with.
I do advisory work for IPsoft, and they have a company called Amelia that does cognitive AI. They put all of these things in enterprise systems in one interface with your own digital assistant. That assistant is able to interpret Workday and all the other aspects to be able to now interface with them, which replaces people in the middle. This is where that's leading because what company doesn't need that? We all have so many disparate systems to manage or interface with. Whether the question is what's the size of my instance on AWS, or that I want to take a vacation day on Monday, so can we add more dependence, etc.—if you have something that's able to interpret all the systems, that's where you can scale.
When the pandemic hit, nothing scaled when it came to these systems. None of the airlines, banks, or travel sites could handle this scale and they still can't, because they don't have the ability to immediately multiply their employee base by a thousand with the same stuff. That's the real power I see coming out of AI. The most human AI is Amelia. Unfortunately, I haven't found more examples that are that advanced, at least in the enterprise space. ServiceNow is a chatbot. I’ve gone through a bunch of others and I don't see the advanced cognitive ability, which is sad because there should be a lot more. I assume there are startups and efforts going on, I just haven't seen them yet.
Right now my devices are teaching me to talk to them, not understanding how I work. At least that’s the case with any of the technologies I've tried to put in. The thing I'm looking forward to the most is reaching the point where AI can actually do things without me knowing. For example, if it can tell me, "We looked at a bunch of risks that are going on and we tracked them down and found them in an environment for you. Here are the findings," without me having to do anything, that's when we'll have real AI. I certainly haven't seen that yet.