Artificial intelligence may help with almost any business challenge that organizations may have nowadays. Artificial intelligence enables them to obtain new clients, for instance, by suggesting the best moment to propose a promotion to a person through sentiment analysis

1. Artificial intelligence, the second wave of
digital transformation
Alberto Otero*
In 2018, artificial intelligence will be
an important topic, as it is the second
wave of digital transformation that
leading companies are already
adopting. If you are a director at one
of these companies, don't let them
tell you about it – be a protagonist of
this change.
The Gartner research company
predicts that, in 2020, 85% of all
CIOs (Chief Information Officers) will
lead artificial intelligence projects in
their organizations. This is due to the
fact that, in the last couple of years,
there have been spectacular
advances in the research on artificial
intelligence, which have enabled us
to deal with business challenges
using this type of technology and
were once unimaginable.
Why is this happening now? The
costs of the required computer
infrastructure have become much
lower, we have large volumes of data
to train intelligent systems and there
have been hefty financial
investments made by, for instance,
digital giants and venture capital
firms. Just to give you an idea,
according to the Harvard business
Review, companies like Google,
Facebook and Microsoft have
invested over USD 20B in artificial
intelligence during 2016, and venture
capitals have funded projects in
about USD 5B during that same year.
Artificial intelligence may help with
almost any business challenge that
organizations may have nowadays.
Artificial intelligence enables them to
obtain new clients, for instance, by
suggesting the best moment to
propose a promotion to a person

2. through sentiment analysis. It allows
them to improve client satisfaction,
anticipating what they will want and
consequently serving them. It
improves their efficiency, for
instance, suggesting solutions to
professionals when they must make
a decision. It also qualifies them to
create new business models using
artificial intelligence to serve specific
client segments in new ways and
with new products.
Thus, we may confirm that artificial
intelligence will permeate everything
we do, in any business process and
in any type of organization. In the
next few years, any usual action in a
professional setting will be supported
or performed by artificial intelligence.
Some of our emails will be answered
automatically, we will receive
suggestions on possible options and
the most adequate course of action
when making a decision, we will
request our vacation from a virtual
assistant or even sell to clients that
an intelligent system decided to
prioritize.
Organizations must adopt artificial
intelligence in the short term, as a
source of competitive advantage,
and in the long term, as a means of
survical (if they do not do so, their
competitors will). In this stage,
however, in order to be successful,
one must be open to experiment with
artificial intelligence, to make tests
and even to fail. We must maintain
an attitude that accepts change and
inonovation.
Even though there are sectors that,
due to their characteristics, are more
prone to adopt new technologies
such as artificial intelligence, we find
that, unlike other past changes, this
one is becoming a source of interest
in almost any kind of organization.
For instance, banks, due to their
handling of large volumes of
information and working with easily
digitizable assets, have steadily
adopted artificial intelligence, but
other sectors such as telecom, retail
and airlines have not been left
behind.
Three key factors in the successful
adoption of artificial intelligence are:
the capacity to imagine how to use
this kind of technology in a practical
manner with business challenges;
having available talent with deep
business and technical knowledge in
order to execute what has been
imagined; and the capacity to
integrate this type of new solution
into pre-existing and highly complex
ecosystems.
Lastly, even though impressive
advances have been made in terms
of artificial intelligence capacity,
there are still major issues to be dealt
with. Some of these issues include:
anything that has to do with ethics in
the adoption of artificial intelligence;
the capacity of explaining not only
why an intelligence has made a
decision, but the reasons that led to
that; avoiding biases in decision
making, which are introduced
essentially during the intelligence
training phase; or the capacity of
learning with smaller data volumes
(from millions to hundreds), like
humans do.
*Alberto Otero, Head of Artificial
Intelligence for everis Americas