You can run. You can hide. But you can’t escape the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we live, think, eat and sleep. It’s also worth bearing in mind that running, hiding and attempting escape won’t do anything for you or your company’s productivity while others confront the Fourth Industrial Revolution challenges head on.
It’s no secret that AI is already influencing our daily lives: think Netflix and YouTube recommendations, Amazon Alexa and Google Home—suggesting what it thinks we like and should do before we consider the options out of own volition.
But AI’s progress is neither uniform nor linear across industries and at times, it can be difficult to separate the hype from the reality.
Despite the scaremongering super-robot Apocalypse 2.0 demise of humanity that we often hear about, a quick look at what smartly-deployed AI can do shows that there is as much cause for optimism as there is for concern.
What emerges from the mist of uncertainty is knowledge that we will have the best tools in history at our disposal to solve complex problems—including a finely-honed ability to understand what our target audiences and stakeholders demand, and new channels of communication. Perhaps most importantly, with AI supporting human intelligence, people powering our industries will be able to focus on core tasks and have more time and room for creativity.
Much of the media’s output today is covered by automation; we need to take another step ahead. For instance, approximately a third of the articles published by Bloomberg today uses some form of automated technologies to varying degrees. The Associated Press now publishes 3,000 stories written by AI tech every quarter. And newsrooms across the world are now relying on the speedy turn-around of copy from AI systems.
This might appear scary for human capital involved in publishing. But where are these robots getting their information? Partly from communicated sources of intelligent information: the communications professionals adept enough to move and change with the times who have pioneered new, disruptive ways of disseminating information to the press.
Regardless of appetite for new technologies, businesses have to embrace the changes as AI technology is developing at a pace 10 times faster than digital transformation. The industry evolved with the rise of digital media and is evolving again with the rise of AI in communications. It’s best to start ahead and accept this change rather than trying to catch up to everyone else.
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