GigaOM Voices of AI

Another great look at the topic.   Currently reading Byron Reese's book, will soon follow with notes on that.

Voices in AI – Episode 50: A Conversation with Steve Pratt  By Byron Reese

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. Today, our guest is Steve Pratt. He is the Chief Executive Officer over at Noodle AI, the enterprise artificial intelligence company. Prior to Noodle, he was responsible for all Watson implementations worldwide, for IBM Global Business Services. He was also the founder and CEO of Infosys Consulting, a Senior Partner at Deloitte Consulting, and a Technology and Strategy Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. Consulting Magazine has twice selected him as one of the top 25 consultants in the world. He has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University and George Washington University. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Pratt: Thank you. Great to be here, Byron.

Let’s start with the basics. What is artificial intelligence, and why is it artificial?

Artificial intelligence is basically any form of learning algorithm; is the way we think of things. We actually think there’s a raging religious debate [about] the differences between artificial intelligence and machine learning, and data science, and cognitive computing, and all of that. But we like to get down to basics, and basically say that they are algorithms that learn from data, and improve over time, and are probabilistic in nature. Basically, it’s anything that learns from data, and improves over time.

So, kind of by definition, the way that you’re thinking of it is it models the future, solely based on the past. Correct?

Yes. Generally, it models the future and sometimes makes recommendations, or it will sometimes just explain things more clearly. It typically uses four categories of data. There is both internal data and external data, and both structured and unstructured data. So, you can think of it kind of as a quadrant. We think the best AI algorithms incorporate all four datasets, because especially in the enterprise, where we’re focused, most of the business value is in the structured data. But usually unstructured data can add a lot of predictive capabilities, and a lot of signal, to come up with better predictions and recommendations. .... "