The secret to making AI effective for your unique business challenges

As long as AI technology is part of the bigger tech story, fear was also part of that conversation. Part of that is simply the general, ever-present fear of the unknown – we don’t know exactly what long-term implications this technology will have, and most people don’t understand what the technology is capable of. However, contrary to those existing fears, AI was never intended to be something to be afraid of or replace human work, but rather was created as a tool intended to improve people in all aspects of life, from work to home and everywhere in life. between.

AI is already all around us

AI is built to serve every industry (and every individual) to maximize results, reallocate existing resources, and ultimately increase efficiency for everyone. As companies adopt AI models, it will help streamline workflows and allow us to do more even when resources are tight. In addition, with the shortage of skilled technical workers remains a relevant problem, AI is more critical than ever. What’s important to know is that with the tremendous advancements that have been made in AI capabilities, tech professionals can “train” your AI to work better to solve and serve your unique business challenges.

In fact, AI already is all around us. One of the biggest tech stories of the past year was about AI: self-driving cars. We are also seeing AI making itself known in healthcare, finance, retail spaces and of course on social media. Here are a few simple and relatable examples of the ways people already use AI every day: customer service chatbots, our friends Siri and Alexa, and shipping logistics.

AI models are also readily available from multiple sources, the key is to find one that works and best suits your business needs. Once you’ve found the model that works best for you, train it to specifically grow your business. So how can the business world use AI technology to streamline workflows and amplify results?

AI for business: a carefully cultivated tool

A very appropriate example is forensic video analysis. Video data is one of the largest categories of data growth worldwide and as such it would take a person countless hours to watch video footage and document anything important whether it is used for security, loss prevention or other business needs. However, sifting through video data takes AI a fraction of the time – not as a replacement for that human, but as a tool we can use so we don’t waste our precious time on a menial task.

AI was not developed by accident, but rather as an important piece of technology that is integral to humanity’s progress. AI is intentionally and carefully crafted, like all tools meant to take us to the next level, and tools we take for granted were scary when they were first invented. Take fire, which is perhaps the most important tool humans have created – fire is scary when left unattended. However, like fire, AI does not work without human supervision, but rather with careful cultivation to increase and improve the capacity of human work.

AI requires training, which makes its possibilities as a tool endless. Training AI may seem like a vague and difficult task, but it’s quite simple: to train your AI, you teach it how to interpret data and what you want it to learn from that data. This doesn’t happen instantly, but rather follows the pattern of all learning, and while it may fail or be incomplete at first, it will get stronger over time with more and more learning and data.

With our example of video forensics, there is a difference between simply letting AI dig through footage and AI on purpose search the images with a goal in mind, such as asking to find all blue cars in video footage of your parking lot. To train your AI for this particular task, show it what type of data it interprets and then tell it what you want it to do with that data. In this case, you might ask him to document every time a blue car appears, but further down the road, you can have him immediately alert, sound an alarm, or otherwise communicate that he sees a blue car.

Beyond the fear of the unknown

The fear of AI is largely due to misrepresentation and misunderstanding, which is not uncommon when it comes to new technology. However, AI has been around for years, whether we see it and realize it or not, which means we already use and trust AI. Finding the AI ​​model that works for your business and training it to perform tasks that increase your workforce and improve your products and services becomes more important as the technology becomes more prevalent across all industries.

Plamen Minev is Technical Director, AI and Cloud at Quantum.