On Wednesday, at AI Everything in Dubai, a panel discussion took place which consisted of people from a variety of different sectors and they spoke about how AI could improve businesses.
With the advent of having higher compute power and more data, we no longer need specialists to build business applications since we have new capabilities which make us think beyond the way we used to in the past.
“Companies are able to produce new things with just data along with the right tools and the right compute power,” said Hassan Sawaf, Director of Applied Science and AI at Amazon Web Services.
Sawaf believes that we are in the third generation of compute development.
“When we started building computers, only specialists used to be able to program. Then we had higher languages like PASCAL and C++, but today you don’t need to think in those terms because now it’s all about data, compute, and algorithms. We are just at the beginning of seeing these applications come to life”, he said.
Sephora’s CTO, Ali Bouhouch spoke about how Sephora is actually part of the digital transformation. The cosmetics company has been working on trying to analyze and really understand its customers on a more intimate level.
“Today, our customers are not just coming to us; we have to go to them. Whether they’re online, on social media, or on the ubiquitous device that never leaves our hands,” he said.
“We use AI to digest all the data we can pick up. Whether it’s through transactions, their activity online, their activity offline.”
Bouhouch explained that Sephora collects data through its customers’ online and offline activity in order to understand where their customers are and what it is they really want.
When asked about AI from a customer-metric perspective, Bouhouch said, “It’s hard to make an attribution when it comes to AI. The key thing is to make sure you have data and data will eventually back it up.”
Another panellist, Thomas Lee-Warren, Digital CTO at Rolls Royce, spoke about how Ai helped optimize their engine programs as they work towards making all their engines in the same geographical location, communicate with one another in order to understand its performance. With AI at its core, engines will be able to tweak issues on the go.
“Rolls Royce has been in the advanced analytics gang for probably over 30 years. So it was very easy for us to embrace the Ai revolution when it occurred,” said Lee-Warren.
“One thing we’re really excited about with AI is how it’s really advancing our intelligent engine program.”
Data underpins a great deal of AI-powered equipment.
Satyam Priyadarshy, Technology Fellow and Chief Data Scientist at Halliburton, believes that AI is very successful in helping businesses find hidden inefficiencies. He stated that if a business intends to grow and ready itself for industry 4.0, hidden inefficiencies need to e tracked and worked on and that is precisely how AI can fundamentally improve a business.
“I look at AI a little different. AI is one component of what we call the complete analytics value chain for what we want to build as digital intelligence,” said Priyadarshy.
Artificial intelligence is expected to be at the core of many businesses within the next few years.