What is AI? Why should I care?

When I look at it from the perspective of infrastructure, if you have digital labor that is cognitive and able to be experts in all systems and be able to dynamically manage through those, that's when you really get the power of AI. And that's nowhere near what a chatbot is.

If you think about Hey Siri, how many times have you found that she doesn't understand you and then you have to interpret yourself to her? That's not AI, that's another chatbot and one with limited capabilities. It has X amount of responses of what it can do and it's not truly learning to be able to follow those new twists and turns like a human would in processing communication. Whether it's a chat or voice, that's the kind of stuff that will change the world, when we have machines that can make you believe that you're talking to a human because they can dynamically adapt with you.

I have dual perspectives. One, I'm on the advisory board of a company called Espressive. I don't like the word chatbot but they’re in the intelligent assistant and service management space, not just for IT, but also for HR and legal etc. They support anyone that needs it and they have AI built-in within the engine that's actually working quite well. My second exposure to AI through my investment in the early seed in the AI space, the guys that came out of Nvidia. They have more of a perspective of I-PASS for AI and their thesis was that it's very difficult to work on those applications unless you are a data scientist or someone that's very experienced with data and AI.

They've been working on democratizing this starting with the labeling piece because if you look at all the components of AI 80% of your time is spent on labeling and training data. You can actually get into the models and algorithms, so that's what they've been automating. It reduces the time required to train and label the data from weeks to literally hours.

I hear about Artificial Intelligence when it comes to call centers, that would be my familiarity with it—chatbots, building a bit around data analytics, building some AI and machine learning into other systems and data models that we put together in different data warehouses. That's how I would define it. There's more to it, but I'm speaking from a cloud contact center as a service perspective, that's how I see it in my industry. I'm sure there are all sorts of different ways to define it throughout the industry.

I think AI is an overused buzzword that encompasses all kinds of things, used when people want to appear like they're doing something sexy and innovative when they may or may not actually be doing so. It covers such a large, vast segment of things in the industry that it’s sometimes more of a marketing term than anything else.