Artificial Intelligence already presents a plethora of applications across industry verticals, enabling organizations to garner business value. As companies are increasingly shifting towards the digital economy, the integration of AI into diverse business functions is surging at a striking pace. The technology is also able to augment human thinking to solve compound problems. However, according to Forbes, while most people think that the fundamental goals of AI are to enable machines to have cognition, perception, and decision-making capabilities that only humans or other intelligent creatures have earlier, Max Tegmark defines AI as “intelligence that is not biological”.
AI performs by mimicking the intelligence and behavior of humans, essentially, what we come to think of as learning, problem solving, understanding and interacting with the real world, and conversations and linguistic communication. However, there are certain subsets pursuing AI technologies in order to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can handle any problem, situation, and thought process that a human can. Although AGI is certainly the goal for many in the AI research being done in academic and lab settings, since no one has successfully developed an AGI solution, it follows that all current AI solutions are narrow.
Perhaps, it is being believed that cognitive technology is a better term for narrow AI which is being applied for only those narrow applications. Over the years, cognitive technologies have been evolving, and businesses are actively looking at them as some have developed radically in recent years, with advancements in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, robotics, and others.
Since cognitive technologies empower the landscape of information technology to perform tasks traditionally done by humans, they can allow enterprises to shatter customary tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality. Instead of trying to build an artificial intelligence, organizations are turning to cognitive technologies to automate and enable their various problem areas which require some aspect of cognition.
To find out how companies are using cognitive technologies, professional services company Deloitte reviewed more than 100 examples of organizations recently implemented or piloted an application of cognitive technologies.
The company found that applications of cognitive technologies fall into three main categories include product, process, or insight. Product applications embed the technology in a product or service to deliver end-customer benefits, while process applications embed the technology in an organization’s workflow to automate or improve operations. And insight applications use cognitive technologies, specifically advanced analytical capabilities such as machine learning, in order to divulge insights that can inform operational and strategic decisions across an organization.
It is expected that cognitive technologies will have a tremendous effect on the way humans interact with technology in years to come, especially in automation, machine learning and information technology areas. Also, technology experts claim that cognitive technology can deal with a voluminous amount of data and repeatable loops of analytics. However, in this context, humans remain in charge of the decision making process.
