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When discussing AI, we are really talking about 3 main things:

• Natural Language Processing – this is the ability to understand what people speak or type.
• Machine Learning – This is where machines begin to understand the patterns within datasets.
• Deep Learning – This is all around the subject of taking a lot of information and providing insight and decisions based on previous examples and patterns that might not be obvious in multiple datasets.

Currently today, there are already some parts of AI in existing IT tools, however, it’s fair to say that we are going through a period where AI is changing in terms of what’s available and what the technology is capable of.

One of the biggest areas which is beginning to happen is around the fact that speech recognition and conversational chat is now capable of being understood by machines, such as Alexa, Google Home, etc. These machines are perfectly capable of interpreting what people say. We also have the likes of Chatbox, which can allow people to chat to a virtual agent that can produce information and try and solve problems for the person they are chatting to (via an Instant Messaging mechanism.) These technologies have been around for some time, however they are becoming much more capable today. Nowadays, the likes of Google can understand dialects of around 100 languages, and that’s pretty big! So, from its launch, to now, we are seeing a substantial change in AI and its becoming very usable! When talking chatbots, take sentimental detection as an example. In the near future, these clever machines will actually be able to interpret whether a person is happy or sad, with the likes of Amazon Comprehend starting to offer this as a feature, that’s pretty cool!

This is also true with the application to IT Service Management. Businesses can now frontend their service desks with this technology, and can start to build upon the data collated into a whole conversation piece with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. In time, it will be able to point the user in the right direction and then have a conversation with them. So, as you can see there are a lot of possibilities here with these platforms today and in the future.

However, a lot of this I’ve described above will depend on what companies want to do with their customer service, or their employee service. Now you might be asking yourself, are these technologies going to take away the need for companies to employ actual people? Well, the answer is not necessarily. This technology could be used to take away the mundane work by automating these needs, but the more complex incidents will continue to be done by humans. So, the interesting thing here is to see if businesses want this service for their client base, or their end users with a machine interface in the future. We shall see!

Chat or Instant Messaging will come a long way and we will see a lot more businesses in the future piloting the chat element of AI. People today are beginning to become more inclined to get an incident they may want resolved quickly and therefore will accept using a chatbot in this way, rather than talking to someone on the phone. The key thing here is to make the chatbot reasonably intelligent to answer questions that it’s meant to be designed for.

Ultimately, AI is growing and it will only get bigger creating significant business opportunities to organisations in the future, so watch this space!

Gary Pruden
CTO

@GaryPruden3

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