Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 26 | Page 36

FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// We have to be conscious that AI does cause disruption and does change the manner in which you work. My recommendation to business leaders is to adopt it at the pace in which humans can bear. entirely automated; it’s going to be a mix of the very best AI can bring and the best humans can bring. What is the future for the technology? For example, if you had a thousand people in a call centre, you could lay off 950 of them tomorrow by switching on an automatic chatbox. But I don’t think that would be very humane or reasonable, especially as call centres have high levels of staff turnover anyway. So, if you manage it carefully, you can downsize your call centre over time by just not hiring as many people as you used to. There will always be things that humans can do better than machines. The most successful businesses are not going to be We’re seeing more graphic processing units being used in AI because of their ability to handle giant data sets. When quantum computing becomes mainstream, maybe in three to five years, you’re going to see the ability to crunch much bigger numbers and solve much more complicated problems. But I also think AI will disappear as a term. It’s always been Artificial Intelligence, it’s just cognitive processes of the human mind that were outsourced to other things, the first one probably being the memory. n Better life decisions with Artificial Intelligence 36 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com