The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work by Tom Davenport. Tom has written several well respected books. Reading Competing on Analytics in 2008, provides me stellar view of business metrics. Keeping Up with the Quants and Big Data at Work both reveal deep insights every organization must absorb to understand predictive analytics and big data. Surprisingly, the AI Advantage falls flat by comparison.
The book’s pitch is well researched, yet there is a surprising lack of unique cases compared to his three books above. Likewise, the opening chapter “Artificial Intelligence Comes of Age—Slowly” provides a general overview to IBM’s Watson. Small hits, and yet a larger unfocused ability of Watson to move the needle on cancer research.
The promise of AI’s subset, machine learning (ML) is very over-promoted across today’s IT sales marketplace. The opening chapter reveals some deep AI shortcomings that should not be ignored.
Meanwhile, examples throughout the book refer to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a somewhat flavor of machine learning. Likewise, this extends into Chapter 2: AI in the Enterprise, the impact of AI for knowledge workers. This type of technology advance is impacting a cognitive advantage in healthcare.
Surprisingly, The AI Advantage released in 2018. But the role of AI driven Deep Fakes is missing. Launched in 2014, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology may indeed be the most contested application of ML.
While amusing for movies and celebrities, certainly there are significant impacts upon society regarding government, corporations, and foreign relations. Shockingly the manipulation of voice has already resulted in financial transfers to criminal organizations.