It's tempting to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence (AI), particularly when devices such as Alexa and Siri increasingly employ human communication. I've been known to throw in a sharp retort every now and then when it misses the point. But AI does not think like humans, and should not be considered a brain, however it can serve as a nervous system for your organization. The 5 senses deliver over 11 billion bits per second through the central nervous system to the brain. Yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. But what is happening to the 11 million bits of data?

Business leaders are understandably overwhelmed by artificial intelligence due to its complexity and disruptive workplace implications. Some estimates suggest that 50% of jobs in existence today, regardless of industry, will vanish over the next 10 years. The job of a retail sales associate has been given a greater than 90% chance of being automated. As a business leader, the appeal to leverage machines is obvious. They can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Retailers must use AI to automate and deliver better decisions and make it possible for associates to be customer experience differentiators. Multichannel retailers are facing an existential crisis. Consumers' buying behaviors and lifestyle choices are changing. Competitive pressures from disruptive pure-play e-commerce players are causing radical changes to antiquated business models, driving down prices and driving up costs. Ultimately, the impact of AI on retail will be manifold more than that of Excel's reign.

New Gartner research explores how retailers gain competitive advantage through the application of algorithms that reduce costs and grow top-line revenue. CIOs can use this research to identify use cases that will improve business performance in the unified commerce retail marketplace. Gartner describes algorithmic business as the "enablement of business value through the action of algorithms on data" and regards algorithms themselves as a way to encapsulate and produce intellectual property, knowledge and insight in a reusable form. Algorithms are a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, as for finding the greatest common divisor. New technologies create opportunities to advance algorithms, incorporating many more data inputs and steps and even decision-making capability.

An article on Business Insider highlights a free bot by British programmer Joshua Browder, 19, who launched a beta version of the ticket busting bot in London in September. In that month alone, 3,000 people used the service to appeal their parking tickets. By February, it had already appealed 3 million worth of parking tickets. In April, Browder launched the bot in New York as well. To-date, the bot has successfully appealed between 160,000 of 250,000 parking tickets in both London and New York, giving it a 64% success rate.

As hard as it may be to believe I actually heard some intelligent discussion on this topic this morning on @MSNBC @morning_joe where it was stated that we are heading to an economy where 80% of people will have nothing to do. That may be a bit extreme but our educational and governmental institutions need to be preparing now for the impending digital revolution. Unlike the industrial revolution this one will not produce the same quantity of good paying jobs to employ the masses. I wrote this last year in response to the Baltimore riots but the content is still relevant. Smart machines enjoy full employment, but what about people? Smart machines, deep neural networks, robots, packages that know exactly where they are going, delivery drones.