Business of Artificial Intelligence

 Good statement of expectations, what it is doing, what has been promised, delivered and not,  and where it needs to go.  As a practitioner, I have seen it all to date. ...  It needs care,  caution and closer links to business needs to make it feasible.

Business of AI

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee in the HBR

Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) is the director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, the Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate at NBER. His research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. At MIT he teaches courses on the economics of information and the Analytics Lab.

The Business of Artificial Intelligence

What it can — and cannot — do for your organization

In the sphere of business, AI is poised have a transformational impact, on the scale of earlier general-purpose technologies. Although it is already in use in thousands of companies around the world, most big opportunities have not yet been tapped. The effects of AI will be magnified in the coming decade, as manufacturing, retailing, transportation, finance, health care, law, advertising, insurance, entertainment, education, and virtually every other industry transform their core processes and business models to take advantage of machine learning. The bottleneck now is in management, implementation, and business imagination. ....


Like so many other new technologies, however, AI has generated lots of unrealistic expectations. We see business plans liberally sprinkled with references to machine learning, neural nets, and other forms of the technology, with little connection to its real capabilities. Simply calling a dating site “AI-powered,” for example, doesn’t make it any more effective, but it might help with fundraising. This article will cut through the noise to describe the real potential of AI, its practical implications, and the barriers to its adoption.  ...."