Artificial Intelligence – is it about to change my industry?

A couple of months ago, 60 minutes ran a segment on IBM Watson’s healthcare initiative and more specifically, the initiative on oncology. The segment was eye opening and the realization that the next huge influence on major industries is left the dock and on its way to major disruption in fields such as Healthcare, Law, Finance and more is much more advanced than most people know. I now bring up AI as Artificial Intelligence is known to those involved from time to time only to find a puzzled look on many faces. My best guess is that to a lot of people this is a “smart” thing to claim to understand when they have no idea of what is really happening.

I went to a trusted pal, LinkedIn, to do some very superficial research: a search for IBM Artificial Intelligence returns over 10,000 contacts; Google 6,500 contacts; Intel 3,000 contacts; Microsoft 9,000 contacts; Apple 1,900 contacts; and just plain Artificial Intelligence over 270,000 contacts.

Google recently announced a breakthrough with state-of-the art breast cancer detection and at the same time made this statement: “What we’ve trained is just a little sliver of software that helps with one part of a very complex series of tasks,” said Lily Peng, the project manager behind Google’s work. “There will hopefully be more and more of these tools that help doctors [who] have to go through an enormous amount of information all the time.” The bottom line is that even experts in the field achieving astonishing developments realize they are barely scratching the surface.

The ABA Journal recently published an article on how AI will transform the legal industry. “Artificial intelligence is more than legal technology. It is the next great hope that will revolutionize the legal profession.” Goldman Sachs published the AI Age and talks about healthcare and retail. In short, a Google search for “how AI will affect……..” will yield you a handful of choices and dozens of articles for each industry category.

Still seem that AI is all about 500,000 geeks toying with technology? AI may be the best kept secret we have ever had but chances are it is already influencing your life and that of countless millions with more to come at an ever increasing pace.