Insights November 9th, 2016

Each week on a Wednesday Nikolas Badminton, Futurist highlights the top stories from the past week relating to the incredible rise of artificial intelligence and its application in society, the workplace, in cities, and in our lives.
In Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – Management Redefined  we see how AI will redefine management, Facebook’s big show and tell at WebSummit, addressing aging, Ad agencies getting in the game, and finding new drugs.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Redefine Management

Many alarms have sounded on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to upend the workforce, especially for easy-to-automate jobs. But managers at all levels will have to adapt to the world of smart machines. The fact is, artificial intelligence will soon be able to do the administrative tasks that consume much of managers’ time faster, better, and at a lower cost.
How can managers — from the front lines to the C-suite — thrive in the age of AI? To find out, we surveyed 1,770 managers from 14 countries and interviewed 37 executives in charge of digital transformation at their organizations. Using this data, we identified five practices that successful managers will need to master.

  • Practice 1: Leave Administration to AI
  • Practice 2: Focus on Judgment Work
  • Practice 3: Treat Intelligent Machines as “Colleagues”
  • Practice 4: Work Like a Designer
  • Practice 5: Develop Social Skills and Networks

Read more at Harvard Business Review

Facebook shows off a feature it says is a big breakthrough in artificial intelligence

When Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer took the stage at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon on Tuesday showing off a way to put filters over videos, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a minor product update.
But Schroepfer’s demonstration was actually a way to show the social media giant’s breakthrough in technology.
Read more at CNBC

Can Artificial Intelligence Address The Challenges Of An Aging Population?

In many countries, the growing number of elderly people puts severe pressure on the healthcare system and families. Addressing this societal change will require new ways of doing things – not just additional budget. Countries like Japan are already looking into technology as a way to supplement the human factor in this equation.
Read more at Forbes

Ad agencies are rushing out artificial intelligence services

In the context of advertising and marketing, AI theoretically means more personalized and interactive consumer experience, including targeted programmatic ad buys, identification of site visitors’ decision-making patterns, conversational commerce like bots, as well as smarter search and recommendation engines on websites, according to six agency executives interviewed for this article.
At the moment, with the help of AI developed by big tech companies, agencies are able to serve cognitive ads and integrate voice-activated assistants in their campaigns. For instance, in September, GroupM’s MEC worked with IBM in a cognitive campaign for Campbell’s Soup, where Watson created personalized recipes as display ads for the brand on The Weather Company’s website based on a user’s location, what the weather is like in the area and the user’s ingredient preference.
In the same month, agency CP+B helped Domino’s release a Facebook Messenger ordering bot, and back in February, the agency added pizza-ordering support from Domino’s to Amazon Alexa, where users could ask the virtual assistant to place an order and track their order.
“The most applicable things in AI right now are chatbot and natural-language processing,” said Joe Corr, executive creative technology director for CP+B’s Boulder office. “Utility chatbot is an easy first step. We are looking to experiment with chatbot that can reflect a brand’s voice and offer entertaining experience.”
Read more at Digiday

MIT Researchers Develop Artificial Intelligence That Can Search for New Drug Compounds

What would you get if you cross ibuprofen with aspirin? No one is sure, but a  team of MIT researchers headed by  Alán Aspuru-Guzik has developed an artificial intelligence program that could provide an answer to this by recommending a molecular structure that amalgamates properties of both the medications.
The program could assist in finding new drug compounds. So far, researchers have relied on software that crawls through huge pools of candidate molecules with the help of rules crafted by chemists to predict or identify useful structures. This technique often requires humans, the precision of simulations, and the necessary processing power. The new artificial intelligence is, however, independent and uses deep learning instead of lengthy simulations. It uses its own experience, created by training machine-learning algorithms with information on countless drug-like molecules.
Read more at Nature News World

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.

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Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist of the Futurist Think Tank. He is world-renowned futurist speaker, a Fellow of The RSA (FRSA), a media personality, and has worked with over 400 of the world’s most impactful companies to establish strategic foresight capabilities, identify trends shaping our world, help anticipate unforeseen risks, and design equitable futures for all. In his new book – ‘Facing Our Futures’ – he challenges short-term thinking and provides executives and organizations with the foundations for futures design and the tools to ignite curiosity, create a framework for futures exploration, and shift their mindset from what is to WHAT IF…

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