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A for Augmented Intelligence

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Olivia Hunt
The common belief today is that Artificial intelligence (AI) will replace human workforce completely. We have all sorts of expectations from AI, right from cooking our food, doing our laundry, driving us around to taking over our jobs. Infact our purchasing choices are also already extensively influenced by what AI recommends.

 

Some see this as a relief from mundane activities while others are worried about a dystopian future controlled by AI. In either case, replicating human judgement, empathy and creativity with AI still seems like a long way to go.

While Artificial intelligence is helpful, it hasn’t reached the “general intelligence” level or “super intelligence”, it remains a work in progress. It relies on humans to feed and train its algorithms.Things that are second nature to humans tend to be very difficult for AI, and things like data processing, and eidetic memory very easy.

Therefore most of the companies are now backing technology that blends the processing power of machines with human social and emotional intelligence.

The age of Augmented Intelligence!, where machines and humans work side by side augmenting and enhancing each other’s core skills & abilities.

Artificial Intelligence Versus Augmented Intelligence

The goals and applications are fundamentally different: Artificial Intelligence aims to replicate human abilities like natural language understanding and learning & reasoning, but Augmented Intelligence aims to create systems that make humans & Machines more effective together, sort of like making the sum of the parts greater than the whole.

Augmented intelligence harnesses the power of Machine Learning and artificial intelligence to assist and augment human capabilities, while letting the human remain in control. The idea is to not replace humans, but collectively get more work done a lot more efficiently. More Iron Man and less Terminator.

The symbiotic relationship between human judgement and machine intelligence can be characterized as Augmented intelligence.

The symbiotic relationship between human judgement and machine intelligence can be characterized as Augmented intelligence.

 

Importance of Augmented Intelligence

Despite the existence and evolution of Artificial Intelligence, there is a need of human element, there are numerous situations where human intuition still trumps Machine Intelligence.

Augmented intelligence is critical in decision making processes where in addition to insights, human experience and “gut-feel” trumps a robotic process. Robotic assistants and Chatbots are exciting and new, but are they really going to move the needle?

Without human oversight and supervision, Artificial Intelligence solutions may introduce significant risk to businesses. For example, Microsoft’s AI chatbot Tay was supposed to become more human-like by learning from human interactions. But instead it became quite evil and picked up more negative words and offensive phrases from the people who trained it to behave in that manner.

Artificial intelligence, even the likes of Alexa and Siri don’t run on magic pixie dust, the algorithms require extensive training data that has been painstakingly sorted and labeled by humans. Some times this data contains subtle biases that can easily be magnified by the AI that uses this data. Creativity, Problem solving and Social collaboration will for the foreseeable future remain the domain of humans, but for now you may have a new colleague to work with an AI bot that can remember more than you can and crunch numbers faster than you.

Augmented Intelligence can be introduced in situations where there’s predictability, repetitiveness and patterns. AI is quite proficient in tackling such tasks, its performance for such work often exceeds human abilities in the same area.

 The role of Augmented Reality will be to modify the job roles by making them more efficient and not replacing them. Here’s an example where machine intelligence actually augments human intelligence.

For customer support agents, the biggest nightmare is to deal with the same issues, tickets and queries over and over. This is a major cost for organizations, where a lot of time and effort is spent on redundant and repetitive tasks.

This is where Augmented Intelligence steps in. Through Augmented Intelligence you can drastically reduce average handling time and overseeing of customer complaints by customer support executives.

 Routine tasks such as setting priorities or following up on tickets and other operational tasks can be automated by Augmented Intelligence. In fact Augmented Intelligence can analyze thousands of past cases, and pinpoint similar cases in a flash to help the agent solve a new issue.

It will “learn” from the customer data stored and get smarter, and will suggest responses to support agents or send automated relevant responses to customers by skimming through the knowledge base.

The humans are therefore left with more cognitively satisfying tasks and the robots take care of mind-numbing routine activities.

 There’s no doubt that AI has advanced rapidly over the recent years, but the awareness to recognize what its limitations are, is important for its correct application.

 The best way for AI to progress is when it gets catalyzed by human expertise. It thus constantly learns and gets guidance and becomes a more sophisticated and better at its job.

So, even though Machines can excel at high speed calculations, Artificial Creativity is still a pipe dream. Creativity may beat observable and known facts, and is usually the only way to solve a challenge that you encounter for the very first time.

Machines can definitely perform better than humans in various areas of endeavour such as facial and object recognition, language translation, image synthesis, n number of games such as chess and Go and so on. But most of these applications of AI are very narrow, General Artificial Intelligence is still a long way away.

iEngage understands this, and which is why its platform powers solutions that allow humans to use their cognitive abilities for higher order tasks and takes over the routine, repetitive tasks thereby assisting humans in a smarter and more intelligent way. Plug in iEngage to connect humans and machines in a meaningful way so work can get done more efficiently.

If you are a maker, and you are working on a solution to improve interactions in your organization, consider iEngage to expedite your build, add Machine Intelligence, a Process engine or Rewards & recognition through simple API calls on the iEngage platform.

Focus on your use case, let iEngage deliver a robust and scalable performance for managing interactions and making them smarter. Talk to us today, benefit from our startup friendly program. We are always looking for interesting ideas to implement using our platform.

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Olivia Hunt
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