AI Comes in Many Flavours

Artificial Intelligence has become a nearly ubiquitous term nowadays. A Deloitte survey revealed that most companies — a staggering 90 percent of those approached by the research and consultancy firm — consider cognitive technologies to be of crucial strategic importance, and over 80 percent of those were either already using it on some level or planning to implement it in the near future.

That is hardly surprising considering the dramatic efficiency savings that adoption can bring. According to Bill Eggers, executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, in the U.S. alone, federal employees spend about 4.3 billion hours per year on a variety of mundane tasks such as recording information and handling. He estimates that currently available AI and robotic process automation could free up about 1.3 billion of those hours by automating such tasks, effectively enabling quantum leaps in productivity as AI allows institutions to anticipate rather than merely react to problems after they occur.

Yet in spite of its pervasiveness, and the fact that it has been around for many decades, AI still falls, paradoxically, in the “emerging technology” category. One that constantly presents new facets and developments that bring us ever closer to the worlds imagined by the likes of Isaac Asimov.