What do self-driving cars, medical operations and world-class chess competitions have in common? Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Now, more than ever before, businesses are leveraging AI to make smarter business decisions, and AI innovation isn’t slowing down. Global spending on AI technologies is predicted to reach nearly $118 billion in 2022 and surpass $300 billion in 2026.
AI not only creates workplace efficiencies that give us more time to focus on critical tasks, but it also provides deeper insights that lead to better-informed business decisions. By increasing organizational productivity and knowledge, AI has come a long way to re-humanize corporate work altogether. It has allowed professionals in nearly any field to take additional time with creative and meaningful endeavors, as well as give greater attention to their business growth and development, such as navigating complex problems, learning brand-new concepts, or improving valuable skills.
All of this digital transformation has led to what’s known as ‘collaborative intelligence,’ the combining of AI and human abilities to enhance their respective core strengths. This results in AI being trained to do what it does best — going through gigabytes of information in fractions of a second — and humans being supported to do what they do best: applying their instincts, experience, and good judgment.
Human-Artificial Intelligence Partnership
The human brain is a tightly integrated organic system — with many complex components — that’s evolved over the past two million years. But our remarkable conscious mind and current capabilities are not only the result of evolutionary forces but also the driving force behind humankind’s advancement. And our human development surely isn’t over yet — not in this new age of AI technology.
It’s hard to believe the term, “artificial intelligence,” was first coined by Dartmouth math professor John McCarthy way back in 1955. Deep learning then opened the proverbial doors to various applications of AI — in the health, finance, education, transportation, and legal sectors. And now, AI is set to make its presence felt in virtually every aspect of our corporate lives — from operations and quality assurance to customer experience and support.
This combo of people and technology power will become even more of a reality in the next decade, according to Gartner, a global leading research and advisory firm, which imagines a “human-centered partnership model of people and AI working together to enhance cognitive performance.” Gartner says that “AI interacting with people and improving what (humans) already know reduces mistakes … and can improve customer interactions.”
This also allows us to remove those repetitive and mundane tasks — think data entry, search, and extraction — and focus on work requiring good old-fashioned emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and advanced intuition. This allows AI to do better and better work through machine learning, too.
Step by Step Approach to Implementing Collaborative Intelligence
The full impact of Collaborative Intelligence takes time. Kevin Kelly writes in his 2017 book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future that at first, we might say to ourselves that AI “Operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.” Then we might say, “Okay, it can have my old boring tasks because it’s obvious that was not what humans were meant to do.” And finally: “Wow, now that AI is doing my old work, my job is so much more interesting.”
For this to be successful, we must ensure that we’re taking a step-by-step approach to implementation. What this looks like is first aligning on a process as a business. Then think about what’s central to your corporate digital transformation and figure out the best possible use of AI. Make sure you have the technology in place to facilitate this, and then learn, test and adjust.
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