Abundance of Information Often is a Liability

sasha uritsky

Jun 22, 2014

A massive change has occurred in the world during the last ten to twenty years. Until recently and throughout the history of mankind information was hard to access. Obtaining and sharing information was either a laborious process or impossible, and the underlying assumption was that information can never be enough.

Today, of course, we have the opposite picture. Not only information is easily available, it keeps pouring in from a growing number of sources, and we continuously find ourselves in situations when there is more information than we want or able to process.

A major task we, as species, are facing is therefore how to reduce or filter out relevant information. It is, to repeat, in direct opposition to the task we’ve been accustomed to during all previous centuries, which was how to obtain information.

Since this change took place only recently, within a lifetime of one generation, we didn’t have time to develop efficient set of procedures to address the new problem. But the work has started and will only accelerate with time.

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MAKING AI MAINSTREAM

We are experiencing a strong demand for conversational AI solutions. It is coming from every corner of the B2C market. It is growing by the day.

Conversational AI is becoming increasingly popular among the consumer facing business community. It is easy to see why - AI offers sales and customer service scalability and therefore is critical for the long-term success of a business.

Conversational AI solutions such as chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants provide much needed speed and efficiency, in an age where the rapid advancement of technology makes them virtually the only sustainable customer service solution.

Bu there is a catch - AI is complicated. Mainstream businesses do not have in house AI expertise. And it is not part of their business model to develop such expertise.

Today’s market offer several good conversational AI solutions, such as IBM Watson or Google DialogFlow. However, getting a business value out of them requires the very AI expertise that mainstream companies do not possess.

So what can be done?

Any AI solution should follow these three steps in order for the mainstream business community to fully benefit from it:

Conversational AI should come as a service,
The service should be available in natural language,
The service should be fully personalized.

In the next several posts we will explore how the AI industry, including nmodes, is moving towards achieving these goals.

Lessons for Businesses from Brazil’s World Cup Disaster

1. Mental, or psychological, state of your team is important: you can put so much pressure on people before they crack. Brazil players didn’t become unqualified professionals overnight. They failed because they were overwhelmed by their country’s expectations, distorted sense of history, and the right to win considered divine. They were too emotionally charged, not in the proper state of mind to compete. So better keep calm, relaxed atmosphere in your team even before launch, or important deadline.

2. Manage customer expectations. Brazil were ramping them up unreasonably. Aggressive messages like the 6^th[title] is coming, statements by their coach about two more steps to heaven massively backfired by creating an unhealthy emotional frenzy in the society, which in return influenced the players (see 1.)

3. Logic, organization is the key to successful execution. Germany are not a great team. But they are very well organized. They had a detailed game-plan where every team member knew his task and several different scenarios where prepared. They were able to adjust when the situation on the field changed to squeeze maximum advantage. Sounds simple? That’s because it is.