How to make AI work for your business

The news about artificial intelligence is mostly dominated by sensational stories such as the ominous threat of deepfakes, deep learning algorithms that create fake blogs, AI bots that create their own language, and generative adversarial networks that create realistic portraits of non-existent people. But the practical use of AI algorithms is much farther behind than the hype caused by the media. From peer-reviewed breakthrough research presented at mainstream AI conferences to PR-style videos created by large tech companies and well-funded research labs, only a trickle of the innovation we see in the field makes it into real business processes and applications. And the organizations that are putting AI to good use are those who understand the powers and limits of today's technology and master the challenges of integrating it into their processes and solutions. "AI does offer a lot of business value, but much of that value isn't terribly sexy or visible. Products and processes will be made somewhat better and easier to use. Decisions will be better informed. We'll continue -- and perhaps even accelerate a bit -- the amazing progress that we've seen over the last couple of decades in data and analytics. But as all of the early adopters have discovered, it's still difficult to create systems that think and communicate like humans -- even in narrow domains," academic and business author Thomas H. Davenport writes in his book The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work.