AI can improve the way a business works and free up employees to hone their emotional intelligence skills. Lee Beardmore, Vice President, Innovation, Business Services at Capgemini, explains how AI benefits hugely from human interaction.
AI is a quick learner – it’s able to win games without even knowing the rules, just by observing others play. In fact, its learning capabilities are endless and its positive implications for the business world are remarkable. However, many organisations are just scratching the surface of its more complex cognitive abilities.
The more data and knowledge you feed an AI system, the better it gets and the more it can help your business. For employees, AI can make their decision-making more effective: AI leans on the person to learn and perform and the person leans on AI for business direction and orchestration.
AI also shields people from the sheer volume of everyday tasks that can often be mundane. Forming relationships with machines frees up time for employees to focus on honing emotional intelligence skills such as empathy, management and strategy, and allows businesses the time to make the best use of the information AI gathers.
Augmenting human effectiveness
As much as the advancements in technology may suggest autonomy in the future, we still need people to make sense of how AI works and apply it in real-world situations. Businesses need to understand that the relationship between people and AI is symbiotic – even though AI enables them to make better, faster business decisions, it also benefits hugely from human interaction.
But before organisations can harness the benefits of an AI-enabled relationship, they need to ensure they have the correct framework in place.
Assess how AI benefits your current service offering
First, for AI to evolve, you have to understand your starting point. Some questions to ask include, Is AI currently being used in your organisation, and if so, where? What is working well and what could be improved?
Get a grip of your data assets
Creating the right climate for AI is essential to support and stimulate it, and one of the most important aspects of this is proper data management. Insufficient or irrelevant data jeopardises the accuracy of AI applications, rendering them unreliable and unusable. The availability of Big Data, assurance that the data is unbiased and the ease of accessing Big Data are all pivotal in helping AI learn and evolve its cognitive abilities in a safe and ethical way.
Used strategically, AI can become an invaluable asset within an organisation’s infrastructure. Not only does it improve employees’ decision-making capacity through its automation capabilities and cognitive functions, but it also frees up their time for creativity and innovation, helping to create a continuous cycle of improvement within the business. AI of this calibre relies on human intervention and collaboration. To create a mutually beneficial relationship between man and machine, organisations must ensure that their culture, data assets and use cases are well researched and the right investments are being made. Those that can, will not only thrive in the short term, they will create a foundation to harness AI’s cognitive abilities in the future, too.
