Cloud-AI in the Non-Profit and Healthcare Industries

I t wasn't long ago that technology was a topic only discussed among techies. In fact, technology was an elective course in many graduate school programs until very recently. Today, technology is part of our daily lives so it's not surprising that technology is very much a part of any industry. It's also not surprising to see the direction technology has taken. It has evolved from a way to communicate with each other and store important information, to a way to interact with each other, express ourselves and manage our lives. The drive to monetize our personal information for the purpose of creating the latest and greatest target marketing algorithm has paved the way for artificial intelligence or AI. Google was a pioneer and early adopter of this type of AI, gathering information about our interest based on our searches and pairing businesses and products we would likely use. It is this type of AI that brings customers to businesses like an arranged marriage. Collection of data through cloud-based applications originally created for business solutions slowly evolved for consumer convenience for everything from banking to entertainment. Amassing raw data to create solutions for everyday activities helped to speed the process of AI for the birth of AI. Had we not partaken in taking information once only saved on our desktops and placing it on cloud servers, AI may not have evolved into the presence of daily life today. Years ago, reluctance and lack of understanding of how digital information is used kept many people who are not computer savvy from partaking in this community. Today, thanks to companies like Facebook and Amazon, people readily share their information with companies with a basic trust that the information will only be used for the purpose intended. This is why, even though the information is occasionally breached, we are so willing to join communities like Citizens app and Waze which use crowd sourcing for the collective purpose of helping each of its participants. Crowd sourcing applications can then place ads as a form of revenue, though not all do. This rather invasive, though passive, business model hones in on our inherent need to share information in order to benefit from the information shared by others.