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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#191

Post by andrewmutz »

I disagree with the headline of the article, but I agree with the conclusion of the article.

AI is in the process of having a huge effect in business software, it's just not the type of business software most of us think of when we think of business software.

Many people think of horizontal business software like MS word, excel, quickbooks, salesforce, etc. Products like this will be hard to automate significantly with AI, since every company is using these products slightly differently. The products are intentionally designed to have as wide a TAM as possible, and so they are general purpose enough to do anything business related.

There is another very large group of business software that people don't as readily know about, and that is vertical-specific business software. These products are not designed to have a wide TAM, but instead to be tailored to specific industries, and provide a ton of value as a result. These vertical products are a perfect fit for automation with AI. The author says "Each business process is a chance for automation", and in these products, these business processes (and all their inputs and outputs) are structured and represented in software.

I am building AI systems at a vertical software company right now and am a big believer in the future of AI in these products. If you have ML expertise and are interested in working on such systems, feel free to email me your resume.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#192

Post by unclebucknasty »

bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…

Well, we can't dismiss the overhype either. Watson and all that. IBM alone is likely responsible for much of the disappointment, with its constant ads around Watson solving the Universe's toughest problems, when what they really seemed to be after is somebody to figure out how to take advantage of this thing they built.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#193

Post by twic »

bearzoo wrote: post #157
twic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) Does it actually? Specifically, what has AI done for Uber?

https://eng.uber.com/machine-learning/

Oh, they use for marketing to investors, i understand.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#194

Post by resiros »

Here is a prediction: This article will not age well. Asking why "AI is so useless for business" in 2020 is like asking why can't I easily order clothes from the internet in 1994. The question is simply 5-10 years too early. The AI startup rush started maybe 2 years ago. Pytorch (the Netscape of ml) has only been released 3 years ago! It's simply too early to make any judgment.

Let's wait 5 years and see. I predict that all the business processes he mentioned will be automated (maybe with mechanical Turk oversight). In 10 years, most of the menial desk jobs will not exist.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#195

Post by mywittyname »

mrosett wrote: post #166
mywittyname wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to go with decision trees where possible for exactly this reason. It's easier to explain than a solution that uses PCA, but has roughly the same results. They are probably not what most people would call ML, but they are simple and solve a number of common problems.

Single decision trees? Or forests?

In most of my work, I could get away with just one big decision tree. I was analyzing user traffic patterns, which has a limited set of metrics associated with it (and lots of boolean values).

I wrote a tool that would go through and find "representative examples" of sessions for each tree path, then I could sit down with the UX designers and show them exactly what the user was doing. This was helpful as that group was the most vocal critics of our work, mainly because the data we provided began to drive UX design from senior management, and they weren't happy about it. But when I could sit down and show them exactly how the user was spinning their wheels, they were more likely to buy into changes (and offer effective solutions).

Plus, I could inform the UX team which design detail was the primary driver for some event we were testing for. An example would be if the user was applying more than three filters, they were less likely to complete their goal. Thus, the UX team was able to devise a couple of reworks to the filtering mechanisms, which improved customer feedback.

This tactic would probably be much more difficult if we used NN to solve the same problem.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#196

Post by pathseeker »

bo1024 wrote: post #159

AI gets such a bad rap. People only think of unsolved or sort-of-solved problems as AI, and don't give AI any credit for the problems it has solved, I guess because by definition those problems seem easy. Think how much Microsoft Office and competitors have amplified business productivity over the last 20 years (yeah yeah, make your jokes too). Word and Powerpoint and Excel are full of AI whether it's spellcheck or a…

>Finding routes for drivers and deliveries, planning schedules, optimizing store layouts, etc. -- that's AI.

If a path-finding algorithm that I can write on paper is AI, AI has completely lost all meaning. Let's not call graph traversal and sorting "AI" please.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#197

Post by lmilcin »

sobellian wrote: post #111
astrophysician wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, part of the problem is that no one can seem to agree about what "AI" even is anymore; you described a control theory model that "calculate[s] the envelope" which I'm interpreting to mean some sort of confidence interval/posterior, but to me that's exactly what you should be doing whenever possible in an "AI" model, as in, control theory (it sounds like with Gaussian Processes or something) is the right "AI" a…

I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly known. For as long as I can remember, AI has been a synonym for "hard CS problem" or even just "hard math problem." It has more use as a marketing term than as a technical term with precise mea…

"I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable."

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I kind of borrowed the term from aviation where this is used to describe conditions under which the behavior of the aircraft is known and predictable. Doesn't mean it is not possible to fly outside the envelope, you just don't get any guarantees.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#198

Post by afeller08 »

AI is useful for business, and it's used in business. Hiring people to do menial mental tasks that would be particularly easy to automate is cheap. Hiring programmers and AI developers to automate those tasks is expensive. I know people who lacked a CS degree and could barely program who transitioned to work as a programmer by getting hired to do a menial task and writing mundane old-fashioned code to automate away their job because that was the only way they could find to transition from menial tasks to a highly skill occupation.

You don't even need AI to automate a lot of these tasks. Good old fashioned programming can automate anything truly menial better than AI can, but if you're going to solve a real problem through code there are only two ways to do it: 1) write the code yourself, or 2) spend millions of dollars hiring other people to do it.

Same is true for AI. In contrast, you can very often hire people to solve the same tasks for minimum wage, or if its a sufficiently digital task, even less than that, through a service like mechanical chimp.

AI isn't used to automate away menial tasks because the economics of it doesn't make sense. None of the problems raised by that article are difficult to overcome, it's just expensive to hire people who solve them well.

This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the current organization of society and its economy.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#199

Post by astrophysician »

sobellian wrote: post #111
astrophysician wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, part of the problem is that no one can seem to agree about what "AI" even is anymore; you described a control theory model that "calculate[s] the envelope" which I'm interpreting to mean some sort of confidence interval/posterior, but to me that's exactly what you should be doing whenever possible in an "AI" model, as in, control theory (it sounds like with Gaussian Processes or something) is the right "AI" a…

I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly known. For as long as I can remember, AI has been a synonym for "hard CS problem" or even just "hard math problem." It has more use as a marketing term than as a technical term with precise mea…

> I took envelope to mean the operating conditions under which the control system is stable. For many control systems this isn't really a confidence interval except insofar as the parameters of the control system are imperfectly known.

Ah gotcha, totally agree.

> It has more use as a marketing term than as a technical term with precise meaning.

yea exactly; not a problem for me that this is the case (buzzwords are just a fact of life), but really what should be happening underneath any "AI" solution is finding and implementing the right solution to the problem. If the right solution is classical control theory or linear models, but the business leaders insist on deep learning because to them that's what AI means, that's where there's a problem.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#200

Post by Grimm1 »

Huh? Most major companies use a staggering amount of AI that makes them a butt load of money. -- Oh, the title was practically unrelated to the content of the article and was just to generate clicks, I see. Well, at least the article raises a good point about AI being used to solve menial tasks that let people focus on the larger creative aspects of their work as an assistive tool. That said, seeing ML push the boundaries of what "menial" (sliding goal post) tasks it solves is both massively cool and massively value generating.
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