MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-04-16 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout of NYLXS] The real AI transformation has taken root
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https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/15/the-sudden-rise-of-the-headless-ai/
AI GUEST
The sudden rise of the headless AI
JENSEN HARRIS, TEXTIO-at-JENSENHARRIS APRIL 15, 2017 10:14 PM

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com/Zapp2Photo
“Hey Siri, how’s the weather today?”
“OK Google, remind me to pay the power bill.”
“Alexa, tell me a joke!”
Bots are eating the world. Whether you are an enterprising app developer
building the essential software to bring a virtual Taylor Swift into
your Slack chats, or just lonely and in need of a dumb, annoying virtual
friend to message you on Facebook, we seem to be clear on one thing:
Many experiences, apps, sites, and products are going to be replaced
with bots. (Unless they are being replaced with VR. Or AR. Or a
typewriter keyboard for your iPhone.)
It’s official: “Bot for X” is the new “Uber for X.”
And sure, bots are cool. Ever since ELIZA struggled to pass the Turing
Test and HAL 9000 murdered his crew (later reincarnated in a hardly
remembered Apple Super Bowl commercial), we’ve been infatuated with the
idea of computers as our inevitable sidekicks.
Bots center around one specific niche aspect of artificial intelligence:
conversational understanding. Human factors experts have long been
enthralled by the idea that a more natural way to communicate with
computers would be through speech, and we’ve spent the better part of a
century building to a point where natural conversations may soon be a
reality.
While this is indeed an important step forward in human-computer
interaction, it is truly just one small part of what AI is about — and
not the part that will matter the most for the enterprise companies that
actually buy almost $4 trillion in software and services each year.
Bots are the new command line
Today, most bots just provide a wrapper around existing functionality.
In the early days of graphical user interface (GUI), the point-and-click
interface provided different ways of achieving the same tasks you could
do on the command line; now most bots provide an additional channel with
which to do tasks you likely often do another way.
Instead of speaking a specific sentence, you can open the Weather app on
your iPhone. You can open your task list and type “Pay the power bill.”
You could search Google for a viola joke.
Many of today’s bots are kind of a hipster façade around the same basic
command line interfaces consumers abandoned in the 1980s. They require
specific syntaxes and understand only a limited vocabulary — but they
sure have personality!
format /q /fs:fat /v:mydisk wasn’t nearly this funny back in the day.
Yes, Taco Bell really did this.
While the added convenience of language recognition is a benefit, until
bots are capable of performing very complex and novel tasks that richly
combine actions and context across the boundaries of apps and sites in
unique ways the first time they are asked, we will be limited to trying
to remember the 489 commands Siri recognizes. (Yes that link is a man
page for Siri.)
The rise of headless AI
But I’m not down on bots. I’m just a lot more excited by the less-flashy
flavor of AI that is changing the nature of work itself: headless AI.
Headless AI is the application of artificial intelligence to vastly
improve internal business processes.
It is fully transforming the crucial machinery of business — processes
like hiring, lead generation, financial modeling, and information
security. Legacy software has become a commodity in all of these areas,
and purpose-built AI solutions will get a larger and larger wallet share
of these huge enterprise cost centers.
Headless AI combines machine intelligence and learning loops to
constantly evolve. Because these solutions plug into the data lifeblood
of a company, they become incredibly valuable as the algorithms adapt to
the patterns that work.
I call this form of AI “headless” because, unlike bots, the value is
mostly not about the personality. Headless AI works with humans and
augments their strengths. It doesn’t try to replace people; it gives
them superpowers.
While being able to talk to your CRM is cool, having a sales platform
that accurately predicts the 100 opportunities you can close this
quarter is worth breaking the bank for. Having a cute avatar answer your
customer support chats seems nice enough, but predicting ahead of time
what areas of your product will get support requests so that you can fix
them before customers suffer is pure gold.
It’s happening! (already)
Though bots get all the glamour, headless AI is quietly happening
everywhere already. These new platforms are generally purpose-built
solutions optimized around specific domains and outcomes data. They
learn not from people talking to them, but by voraciously chomping up
all of the relevant proprietary data fed into them. The best systems
employ learning loops and massive streams of incoming data to constantly
improve.
This creates a multiplier effect: The earlier and more pervasively an
organization rolls out headless AI solutions, the more quickly the
positive results compound. If you wait a year to deploy, you don’t just
lose the year of improved productivity — you lose the year of learning
and adaptation of the software to your company’s patterns. This puts you
doubly behind.
Companies like Apple, Expedia, and Johnson & Johnson use Textio’s
augmented writing platform to chop weeks off the time it takes them to
fill open jobs. DeepMind helped Google reduce power consumption in its
data centers by 15 percent. A former NSA analyst created Area 1 Security
to predict cyberattacks before they happen.
These new headless AI companies, and dozens of others, are helping
enterprises make the kind of radical productivity leaps that they
haven’t seen from software in decades.
Headless AI is where the money is
I’m not sure if there’s a revenue model that works for bots. I guess we
will see. People are trying to figure that out. I’m thankful I don’t
have to!
What I do know is that there is a lot of money to be made in
transforming the efficiency of core enterprise functions. This is what
headless AI is all about.
If you can improve a crucial business process in a decisive way and by a
clear and measurable amount, that is incredibly valuable.
What is most game-changing about this kind of software is that it is
purely quantitative. Unlike a bot, where the potential return on
investment is fairly qualitative (“customers liked interacting with the
bot”), most headless AI is fully in the realm of predicting the future
and then helping you change that future. It’s focused where the return
on investment is measurable and evident.
Improving — in real life — the quantity, quality, and demographics of
the people who walk through your front door with resumes in hand… how
much is it worth to be able to hire better people more quickly than your
competition?
If you can predict exactly who will buy what, and when… how much could
you improve your customer experience?
Because this kind of software proves itself through the numbers, it is
inherently valuable and easy to budget for. Headless is where the real
AI money is.
Headless AI everywhere
In the near future, every core business function will have been
transformed by AI — hiring, sales, security, marketing, finance,
manufacturing… everything. Purpose-built headless AI platforms will
provide the new infrastructure that will drive every business.
The enterprises that are already on this train will continue getting an
outsized advantage until everyone else catches up. Legacy software will
get squeezed down into a smaller portion of the IT wallet as the most
valuable services become the native AI platforms — just as form-based
desktop software got squeezed out by the cloud in the last generation.
Bots are here to stay. They’ll keep getting headlines. “OK Google,
search for tacobot.”
But the real enterprise revolution is happening in the companies that
are using headless AI to transform their core businesses.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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