A Tribute to the Future: AI, the Butler
We are thriving in a world of pace. All of us are motivated to achieve our dreams. With the thinning of borders and increased interactions, we are far more curious than cautious.
Have we wondered why we are able to do so? I believe it is because our past generations gave up theirs. They’ve set the platform we are spring-boarding on to hit the cloud 9. They laid the foundations; the young demography & a healthy dependency ratio. With that retrospective view, what shall we be promising for our next-Gen denizens?
I grew up in the Deccan Coal belt & have always been far more inquisitive than my mother’s comfort level. I have seen how the ecosystems of society build over time. How beautifully, even in chaos, it finds harmony! How brilliantly the web spun around the inconsistencies & syncs up to form a melody!! We, humans, are resilient.
Leaving & learning from the memory lanes, what I want to project today is that how our past has helped us achieve what we are and how the changing landscapes of demography affecting the dependency ratio need to be combated. What is our purpose!
The AI pill for the Greying World
It is not a myth that the world is aging. India is one of the youngest with 65% being less than 35 yrs. Japan is the oldest with 33% being above 60. The population is also growing rapidly. Population growth estimates by 2050 — U.S. (28%), Brazil (18%), Nigeria (176%), Kenya (138%), Pakistan (57%), India (34%), Indonesia (34%). By 2050, the dependency ratio is going to increase. Hence, the workforce in population would gradually decline over the next 5–6 decades as the world ages. So, how to combat this while keeping all the services & lifestyle trends going up. The answer is Artificial Intelligence.
Retrospectively, when my town was setting up, everyone helped each other. So, the services, from dailies to emergencies, were communicated & serviced by humans. We had a handyman for everything — even for conveying messages from door to door. Skip 10 years, India was breathing the flames of liberalization — The Roaring 90s. I find telephones, faxes, remote controls, etc. making our lives easier. Well, even I began to contest parental orders to change the TV channels. Thank you for remote control. You’re a life saver I thought.
So, what have we learned? When population ages, the ones lower than 15 & higher than 65 needs support of the taxpayers. The baby-boomer generations solved it by procreation. They lowered the dependency ratio for the next few decades to come. Hence, we today have a healthy workforce. Technology is still the communication end but businesses are still being serviced by humans — Online commerce, cabs, healthcare, aviation and the list goes on. There will be a day when human capital will be scarce than today and demands will only rise. Hence, Amazon is working on drones, Tesla on self-driven cars & I can bet every industry is trying to understand and exploit the power of AI.
So…. what’s my point? AI will start to deliver the business to its customers. It has to. The aim is to evolve from communicating into delivering the service/business requests raised by the customers. And... I’ve got good news, we’ve started with the baby steps already. BFSI & analytics industries are investing heavily in AI. All Banks have launched Chatbots to help their customers find their needs serviced with just voice command.
Can Artificial Intelligence really help?
Well, tell me something. How comfortable are you with flying on a jet controlled by AI? Feel scary? But, you must know, even today, it is mostly on autopilot. Let me tone down a bit and ask you, how are you so sure that Google Maps has marked the place correctly? Somehow, you’ve come to accept the fact, it is already smarter than you or your peers about telling you where to reach and quickly. It was gradual but it is the truth. So, AI has incremental progress. It starts slowly but after an inflection point, the returns are phenomenally exponential & can be bucketed into 3 business aspects.
- Cost reduction: AI when comes into delivering the businesses will reduce human capital investment. It can handle the basic but mundane tasks & that too relentlessly. There’s no fear of attrition & the intelligence keeps on increasing over time.
- Accelerating efficiencies: When you free up an employee of the mundane, they could be able to contribute more. Even today, the voice assistant isn’t competing with people. They are building into the efficiencies by helping reduce miscommunication, proper routing of complex queries & better utilization of the human capital.
- Scoring life-changing breakthrough: I need not say more on this. The way we’ve fallen dependent on Google Maps to get around is a live use case today. But, have you ever wondered, what it took to achieve such a breakthrough? Yes, you’re correct. Data — a lot of data then you can ever imagine.
What it takes to assemble AI “lego kit”?
I have discussed with a lot of business leaders about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Let me affirm you, we often talk about Matrix, Terminator, Total Recall, etc but our fears about the rise of machines are far removed. As per “Future of Work: More than a Machine”, above 70% people in Germany & US want AI to be implemented at work to free them up from the mundane and mechanical work which can be automated.
So the next big question: Regardless of where you are right now, how do you harness the power of AI and machine learning for your business?
It’s simple. Begin with the data. Victorious AI and ML are always anchored to a data-driven strategy — there’s no machine learning if there isn’t a good amount of actionable data at the ready. And “ready” is the subjective word: in my experience, many leaders eager to embark on an ML project find their data is less robust, transferable, comprehensive or fluid than they originally assumed.
As a closing statement, I’d like to re-affirm that, the AI champions in this seismic shift will be the companies who get it. They’re the ones catching and actioning upon real-time data and the ones that are willing to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and deliver. Armed with these insights and Intel, companies will use AI and ML to achieve true business impact. Those shall be among the envelope-pushers and game-changers driving this critical moment in time.
In other words, we would have drafted a beautiful future for our predecessors. We’d have carved our marks on the bedrock of our future & give them something that they’ll love and respect about us. Imagine if you could own Wall-E for a pet!!
Let’s together sculpt a better tomorrow.
Unless we’re already in the Matrix! Food for thought!
