Companies will 'get serious' about AI technology in 2017

Basic robotic process automation isn't smart and doesn't learn, but systems that do will raise new questions for organizations. Namely, as one audience member pointed out, who is going to sign off on a recommendation made by a machine when it may not be clear how the machine arrived at the recommendation? The key is to make machine-generated recommendations as transparent as possible, Mahidhar said. He referred to it as building trust and "tractability" into the system. When a major retailer wanted to dig into the $1 billion it spends on transporting products to find out if it was being overcharged, RAGE focused on the contracts, which were numerous, complex and lengthy.