Business and Technology are Migrating to the Cloud – Part 4: Mountains of Data Meet Artificial Intelligence

July 8, 2016

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July 8, 2016 – The future of business is in the cloud. That’s because the trend in the business world is to a blend of both local sourced and online data resources. In the brief period of human history when we have moved from analog systems to digital computing, local area networks and the Internet, mountains of data have been created. And now we are finally figuring ways to extract intelligence from the piles. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.

The intelligent machine future is now. Our existence today is being augmented by Siri, Cortana or Ask Google. We ask questions and these voice assistants provide answers by searching the data that is publicly accessible to us from the Internet. But the questions Siri can answer are simple ones. The more complex ones we ask get are getting answered by advanced machine intelligence technology such as Deep Learning with platforms like Cloudera and IBM’s Watson.

Google, probably the most invested company in the use of AI in the cloud today, allows users to tap into translation in over 50 languages, speech recognition that can turn almost any audio file into searchable text, and advanced computer vision that can parse images whether still frame or video.

Joining Google and not to be outdone is Microsoft with its offer of cognitive cloud services that include:

computer vision
emotion recognition
facial analysis
video analysis
speech recognition
language understanding and translation
contextual knowledge understanding
advanced image and metadata search
intelligent bots that learn to interact with users naturally

Data in the cloud can now be analyzed and integrated from a wide range of sources and intelligence can then be extracted in ways never thought possible. This is providing public services like never before. But nothing compares to what AI in the cloud can do for business decision making. And the business at hand is not necessarily commerce. We are talking about knowledge bases that can be mined by the public as never before.

Whether you are a manufacturer of airplanes or a researcher studying ways to cure cancer, cloud AI represents a revolution which seems to have no limits.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal that appeared in 2011, author Joe Mullich wrote a piece entitled 16 Ways The Cloud Will Change Our Lives. In it Mullich makes the following predictions:

Everyone will access information in a compelling fashion based on gaming principles.
Fixing stuff will be easier.
Computers will turn invisible.
You’ll actually find what you want when you shop.
Everyone will be giving you advice.
You’ll be sold to differently.
You’ll be able to make smarter decisions.
Small business will be able to go global faster than every before.
Road trips will never be the same with location tracking and analytics assisting you all the way.
Your home will be healthier.
Doctors will make medical diagnoses and decisions almost instantaneously.
Security of data will be ubiquitous.
Community clouds will replace traditional company supply chains.
Everyone will have the means to collaborate.
Language barriers will disappear.
The distinction between Developed and Developing countries will blur.

It’s a good list that was true in 2011 and remains so today.

Are there risks in this new paradigm? Will we lose control to the machines themselves or suffer from human hackers who hijack our data? We’ve already seen one university lose control of its email server to a hacker asking for ransom. So it is not inconceivable that this vulnerability poses a potential danger. But are move to the cloud seems relentless and s few security breaches do not seem to be stopping us from this shift.

Whether IBM, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon, the companies that dominate the Internet today, all see cloud computing as transformative and disruptive and the way forward for human society in a complex world facing enormous challenges.