Much like the evolution of systems design, IT-enabled process change ebbs and flows over time. We see this in history as each technology revolution brings..

Read the full article at: techcrunch.com

Artificial Intelligence is back! And AI Apps can have a real business impact this time around.

Excellent article by Forrester’s Michael Yamnitsky in TechCrunch on the rise of AI apps, which of course is great news for Evercontact as we are one 🙂

Artificial Intelligence is as old as computer science, but is making a comeback now after the initial AI craze from the 60s to the 80s, as popularized in big films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and WarGames, met with a series of flops.

The problem was the initial enthusiasm wasn’t backed up by real world results. One notable example being the 60s craze for automatic translation which sounded great on paper but turned out to not work at all in real life. So AI got a bad name.

Who remembers Bob, the Windows sidekick personally launched by Bill Gates in the 90s?

But now it’s back! We knew this already as Evercontact uses AI based technology to automate contact updates, by analyzing email signatures and patterns to figure out which are real contacts and to keep them up-to-date.

But it’s not just us:  Microsoft is trying again with Cortana, their answer to Apple’s intelligent personal assistant Siri and Google’s Google Now.

Why do we think things be sweeter for AI Apps the 2nd time around?

*Instead of trying to replace humans, AI is now intent on augmenting us.

*Advances in neural networks and machine learning mean we can build genuinely useful AI-based business products without hardcoding knowledge rules.

*Moore’s Law is proving to be true: computing power is going up while chip size is going down, so there is no need for giant expensive machines for powerful AI Apps – all you need are server farms in the cloud.

*Everything is connected now with the internet. As an obvious example, automating contact updates is much easier when people are sending each other emails vs trying to collect information from handwritten envelopes!

*Connections combined with Big Data means there is lots of information out there which is also more easily accessed. In our case, instead of research and spoonfeeding a program with all of the possible ways phone numbers are written so that we can automatically identify them in an email signature to add to your address book – +1 999 888 9999 vs (999) 888-9999 for example – a simple internet search turns up millions of phone numbers and all the ways people write them down as examples

*All of this combined with the trend towards invisible apps means AI is back in fashion. And this time it can really deliver to automate mundane tasks and have a real impact on business models.

Michael’s take on the forthcoming AI “Gold Rush” and what it means for your business is here.