AI and its potential to boost your company's bottom line

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook revealed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) machines had developed their own language to communicate in a more efficient fashion. The response was wide-scale scaremongering from pundits who lamented the evolution of computers. It might be a while before robots take over, but a recent study from Oxford University suggests that robots and AI will replace most human tasks by as early as 2051 and all human jobs by 2136. Technology has already progressed enough to give us driverless cars, robot police and autonomous delivery drones, but the true impact will go beyond making large swaths of the population redundant and drastically alter our society as we know it – from education and health care, to the criminal justice system. "Traditionally, to get a computer to do something, you had to write code and algorithms, but AI is different...the algorithm works independently," said Duncan Angove, president of software company Infor at a recent conference in New York.