Many people have been slow to rely on artificial intelligence (AI) or to acknowledge its rapid growth. However, AI is already woven into the fabric of our daily lives. It is used for personal digital marketing, autopilot functions in vehicles and planes, entertainment streaming apps, and even for voice assistants on our smartphones (I see you, Siri and Alexa).
It is also used to solve companies’ most critical challenges, empowering them to run a more sustainable, safer, and profitable business.
People rely on AI in their personal lives to enhance their standard of living and productivity, and yet, they may not recognize how similar technology could significantly enhance their professional lives as well. This is partly due to the notion that AI is too advanced, too complicated, and too intense to yield worthwhile gains to average businesspeople.
However, everyone said the same thing about computers, and now, most businesses can’t function without them.
At SparkCognition, we have seen mental roadblocks that prevent businesses from pursuing innovation. But we have also seen the real-world value AI technologies deliver to companies time and time again. To help them achieve these results, we want to dispel some of the commonly held misconceptions in the market.
#1: You must be a data scientist to implement AI
One of the most commonly held misconceptions about business applications of AI is that one must be a data scientist to understand or implement it. This would be quite unfortunate considering not every company has a team or even an employee with this distinct background.
Luckily, our AI solutions are built on user-friendly platforms that present deep insights with a few clicks of a button. They are straightforward and intended for everyone ranging from non-digital natives to data scientists, thus allowing all businesses the ability to leverage AI to capitalize on emerging opportunities regardless of whether they have a team of technologically-adept analysts or not. This means that users who are not experts themselves can solve problems that were originally only solved by subject matter experts, which leads to a plethora of growth opportunities and a strong competitive advantage.
#2: AI removes humans from the loop
Another common misconception is that AI cuts the human out of the process entirely. While modern movies try to exhibit this idea, in reality, AI partners with humans rather than replacing them.
For example, SparkCognition Visual AI Advisor is a product that helps organizations detect critical safety, security, visual inspection, productivity, and situational awareness issues. Alerting managers to potential health, safety, and productivity risks allows the AI to partner with a company’s managers by giving them the information they need to make informed decisions that reduce accidents, strengthen security, and increase efficiency.
The technology performs the grunt work of gathering data and analyzing it, and the human is responsible for acting on the information presented to them. Both entities work as a team to enhance the company’s overall performance.
#3: Individuals must blindly trust AI technology
Many people believe that to adopt an AI solution, they must blindly trust technologically-founded decisions that they don’t fully understand. AI solutions are advanced, but they still require insight from a company’s management team to yield the impact they are designed to have.
SparkCognition’s AI solutions free up more time for humans to focus on complex problems that require human creativity. With technology taking over the tedious role of collecting and analyzing data, humans spend less time digging through data to find insights and more time using this information to make impactful decisions.
The results of these solutions speak for themselves.
As an example, a leading potato chip producer in India had been discarding up to 7% of its finished product due to defective quality problems. Originally, managers had applied a manual scanning process. However, subjective and fluctuating observation skills influenced the human scanning teams which resulted in an undesirable level of quality improvement.
Therefore, the company implemented SparkCognition Visual AI Advisor to streamline the visual scanning process which allowed them to vastly improve quality control and achieve objective defect identification.
The management team had identified the problem, used our AI Advisor to collect and sort the relevant data, and then used the insights to make their own crucial decision: whether to accept or reject the batch of potatoes.
The case worked because of the collaborative nature between the management team and the AI technology–a true partnership.
Despite the common misconceptions regarding the implementation of AI in business applications, AI is not as elusive and strenuous as people tend to believe. You don’t have to be a data scientist, removed from the loop, or blindly trust technology to implement and realize the benefits of AI solutions–and these solutions are available to deploy today!
