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The changing perception of AI
October 19, 2017
There is no shortage of AI conferences nowadays and it is always interesting what the real business people take home. To get valuable insights into this, we asked three of our top specialists - Butch Reh, Vice President Sales North America, David Bayer, VP Text Analytics, and Olga Frumkina, Marketing Director ABBYY Asia - to share their impressions. All the three were present at the recently concluded AI Summit in San Francisco. After all, one of the most important aspects of attending the AI conference, besides thought leadership, is exchanging ideas with our readers and finding inspiration.
We asked Butch, David and Olga what they saw as the main trends in AI after visiting the AI Summit in San Francisco? And what were their strongest impressions? And got these replies:
My biggest takeaway is that customers are starting to look beyond the hype. They want to know how AI is used to solve real business problems, and drive value to the organization. ABBYY was one of two linguistic, text-oriented, companies at the conference, and the only one with a strong content analytics platform. We had a series of deep conversations with Fortune 100 companies who inquired directly, without any prompting or discovery, about contract analytics and compliance use case and capabilities that are a sweet spot for ABBYY Text Analytics. The platform approach, coupled with our focus on risk analytics, resonated strongly. Net/net: ABBYY will continue to differentiate itself by the value we provide based on AI technologies, and the innovative solutions that we bring to market. The world does not need another generic AI algorithmic tool vendor.
David Bayer
The strongest impression I had from the AI Summit in San Francisco is how the audience welcomed the content. This suggests to me that the topic of AI has started to gain importance not only for software engineers, but for business people thanks to the increase in number of practical cases from different industries that proved its real business value. AI solutions for personalization, communication, recommendation and analyses are having great impact on customer experience and, as consequence, on company’s competitive position.
Olga Frumkina
There is movement from traditional Artificial Intelligence concepts to a deep learning approach which is being embraced almost across the board. Companies are realizing that it’s not enough to simply maintain and understand data, but rather the true value comes from what can be done with the data. This extends far beyond using information for rear-facing analysis towards a much more forward-leaning mindset. Also, AI technologies are pervasive in today’s world even in places that we wouldn’t ordinarily recognize.
Butch Reh
Artificial Intelligence and the effects of AI technologies are everywhere. If someone believes that AI doesn’t impact their world today they are simply not paying attention. The technologies and their uses are quickly expanding with seemingly no end in sight. There is absolutely an opportunity for ABBYY to have a strong presence in this space with increased creativity and innovation.
Thus, AI is on its way from R&D stage to becoming a must-have.