Top takeaways from AI World, as seen by Appen - AI Trends

A team from Appen, a global leader in speech and search technology services, recently attended the inaugural AI World Conference & Expo in San Francisco, where over 2,000 attendees from a variety of industries convened to hear from business leaders who are using Artificial Intelligence to drive growth for their companies. According to the conference organizers, "more than 55% of our attendees came from global 2000 organizations, including innovation leaders from Google, General Electric, Nielsen, McKinsey, Schlumberger, Facebook, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, NTT, IBM, SRI and Baidu." While the concept of AI is not new, the technology is experiencing a rebirth in the form of machine learning and cognitive computing, with companies from startups to enterprises looking to benefit from AI's potential. While AI may replace some human effort, it won't eliminate it. Dr. Neil Eklund, Chief Data Scientist, Schlumberger who spoke in the day 1 executive panel, suggested that human experts are still a necessity for fine-tuning AI. Further, Dr. Eklund recommended that as a best practice to set acceptable accuracy rates and when data shows a drop below those thresholds, human intervention is necessary.