Back

 Industry News Details

 
Who's Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence? Posted on : Oct 15 - 2017

“Humans were are not built to spend more than two hours looking at a screen or scrolling through excel sheets. Humans are best at being human. Artificial Intelligence will do the rest.”

Telling words from Jim Stolze, Co-founder of aigency (www.aigency.com) – an Amsterdam-based company that recruits AI and humans for work. Kind of an employment company run by three humans overseeing 59 robots (actually computers working on algorithms created at the University of Amsterdam to solve problems).

Stolze was addressing reporters in StartUp Village at the Amsterdam Science Park on the sidelines of the first World Summit AI in Amsterdam October 11-12. A tech entrepreneur and former ambassador for TED.com, setting up TED events all over Europe and the Middle East, Stolze founded aigency four years ago as “the network that connects data-sets with algorithms, business with talent.” In case it’s not obvious, the “aigency” is a reference to “artificial intelligence.”

Job Crusher?

“You have to think of AI as job augmentation, not job displacement,” Stolze continues. “Work will create work.” Heineken and Unilever are big customers, turning to aigency for specific problems; Stolze in turn hooks them up with researchers and even students from the University of Amsterdam. “You’ll find six thousand people are still working in an autonomous car factory,” he claims.

Automation has been a staple in heavy manufacturing for decades. Now it’s moving into the white-collar arena. “Procurement,” says Stolze, is a big area. “Here’s a guy in procurement who gets an invoice for something; he can’t figure out what it’s for or which department has to pay it. He spends hours or even days running around from department to department trying to figure out what to do with this invoice. Meanwhile the vendor is waiting for his money. With AI you can scan the invoice and the algorithm will pinpoint or at least narrow down what the invoice is for and whose department should be charged.”

Outside of the back office, most of us are already dealing with AI and bots without knowing it. Retail sites’ chat rooms are bots, calling on humans when customer questions become too complicated or personal. Marketers, for example. Chances are the subject lines of most of the emails you open from companies weren’t written by humans. It’s called “language optimization.”

“We apply our own cognitive bias in writing,” says Parry Malm, a speaker at the World Summit AI and CEO of Phrasee, a UK-based company whose vision is “to supercharge digital marketing using artificial intelligence.” Phrasee counts Domino’s Pizza among its clients. Malm “AI takes it out, so there’s no more guess work in using marketing language. The algorithm figures out the best wording to attract targeted customers. Malm claims Domino’s email open rate increased 27% using AI and language optimization. View More