Time To Up The IQ On Artificial Intelligence Posted on : Sep 20 - 2017

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were planes, trains or cars. So, why would something as complex as artificial intelligence (AI) have cropped up overnight?

The answer is, it didn’t. The technology originated in the 1950s, when the term “artificial intelligence” was first used by math professor John McCarthy. Even then, terms and ideas such as Bayesian networks, data mining and neural networks were already making their debut. Early artificial intelligences were built on the foundation of statistics, just as they are today. By the 1970s, the MYCIN AI program was diagnosing blood infections with better accuracy than doctors.

Yet it seems AI has only really gone mainstream in recent years. Why is this? Akli Adjaoute, founder, president and CEO of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies provider Brighterion, told Karen Webster in a recent episode of the “In Their Own Words” podcast series that the main difference between then and now is scale. Today, he said, there is much more computing power and much more data available to feed into AI systems.

Little has changed other than that, according to Adjaoute. Legacy AI and data scientists are still focused on statistics, neural networks, data mining and deep learning, just as they were almost 50 years ago. Yet those same technologies are being hawked and hyped today as if they had just been created.

Adjaoute believes it is time for data scientists to just let AI do its thing — which is much more than what it has been doing, he noted, and would free up those legacy AI and data scientists to focus their efforts where they are more needed.

Many fraud and risk experts say AI can only do part of the job when it comes to mitigating those threats, and, after a point, humans must step in. But Adjaoute believes AI is capable of doing the whole job if we let it, and a system that can’t does not deserve to be called “AI.”

“The majority of solutions you have in the market are based on [rules] written by experts,” said Adjaoute, “but they apply the same logic to everyone. They have high false-positives. To protect consumers and avoid friction while protecting them, you need technology that learns the behavior of each cardholder — with privacy protection in place, of course. Real artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve these issues.”

Fraudsters work around the rules. The problem, Adjaoute said, is that consumers aren’t always predictable when it comes to behavior. They travel, for example, and they do different, atypical activities on special occasions.

He believes artificial intelligence is the way to address this through predictive analytics. True AI, Adjaoute said, offers personalization. It’s self-learning and self-adaptive. It doesn’t just learn from the past; it detects anomalies in real time. An AI such as this would be more than capable of fighting fraud all on its own, he explained.

“If you have AI, but it only works for one problem, where is the intelligence there?” Adjaoute said. “When you really do AI, you need a platform that works with any data in any format from any source, and the AI platform must do that automatically. It must have the capacity to analyze, discover, create new fields, enrich data and automatically design models. You don’t need a team of