On the 17th of January, the annual Data & Tech Congress took place at Jaarbeurs Utrecht where we had an opportunity to share our knowledge about artificial intelligence and experience from Silicon Valey.
The event itself had excellent speakers with inspiring stories about data, technology and artificial intelligence. Besides these amazing speakers, we also had a great audience who actively participated with questions during the keynotes and workshops.
We, as Symphony, were focussed on demystification of artificial intelligence where we also shared our experience from the practical point of view. The world has seen rapid development of technology and exponential growth in the last decade, while our way of thinking has not improved a bit. We are still stuck in linear thinking! Most organizations don’t know how to deal with the challenge posed by technological development. Instead of changing the organizations at their heart, everybody is trying to fit the technology and the new world onto something that it just does not fit. The AI is the mantra of the current era, and most common thought is that it will change the world as we know and see it.
Before you subject yourself to a belief that computers are going to take over, you have to know that they can do things that only the most intelligent humans once could. On the other side, they fail tremendously at challenges that even the least intelligent humans accomplish without conscious difficulty.
Even with all these advances in the machine learning, the truth remains that we are still nowhere near creating AI machines that feel any emotions at all. We believe that the basic literacy of the technology is crucial for participating in the AI future that humanity is headed towards, and no one should be left behind.
With the current media flow of fake news, it’s effortless to misread and overestimate achievements in artificial intelligence. This is most evident in the NLP (Natural Language Processing) where media appearances can falsely hint in dept-capabilities of solutions. In 2018 we have seen a number of companies giving people the impression that NLP solutions can engage in a genuine conversation as a person would. Just because a smart speaker or phone assistant can respond to different ways of asking the weather, it doesn’t mean it fully understands the human language. Current NLP solutions are very good at understanding words and sentences that have very clear meanings and they can carry out basic commands. But you are in for a big disappointment if you think you can engage in meaningful conversations with them and discuss abstract topics.
This is why we believe that without a thorough understanding of AI, we are nowhere and without a data and analytics culture and strategy, we are far from getting ahead of our competition.
As a culture-driven technology house, we help companies approach things from a robust business challenge and help them look at the best technological solution. We are providing our customers with support on the strategic level of digital transformation with dedicated development and data science teams, but we are also educating them on practical possibilities through Symphony AI Academy.
