Every year, the Los Angeles Business Journal gives the Patrick Soon-Shiong Innovation Award to a company that is doing possibility-redefining things to further tech. This year it went to LA-based Scorpion Computer Services, Inc. for their groundbreaking artificial intelligence software, ScenGen (short for Scenario Generator). It's a major step forward for the field of AI that has been picked up by the Department of Defense's Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for a trial run of its operational uses.
With applications from military campaign strategy to predictive analysis, the implications of artificial intelligence innovations are boundless. But more than its high-level uses, 2017 will invite artificial intelligence innovations into our daily lives in unprecedented ways. Here are 5 ways AI will transform your business, if you let it.
1. It will help you integrate and consolidate
A major hurdle of growing a business is overcoming fragmentation caused by scaling. As we grow, our needs grow too, and soon our trunks have grown boughs, which have grown branches, and so on. The delegation it necessitates can become unwieldy.
Technology like ScenGen takes working parts that seem disparate, and combines them into a functioning whole by predicting and testing how each piece operates and organizing them more effectively. This is efficiency at its finest, and incorporating artificial intelligence to consolidate employees, tasks, and systems will reap immediate benefits.
2. You'll have an unprecedented ability to think fast
Artificial intelligence is difficult to define succinctly, but one feature is its ability to think more quickly through a problem than a human mind could. As Scorpion's founder Walter O'Brien put it, "ScenGen's AI generates 250 years of human thinking every 90 minutes, so you can be certain that you have considered all possible scenarios for a given situation."
Think of the applications for that kind of scenario processing ability in your business. The mitigated risks afforded by the technology makes decision-making less about avoiding potential pratfalls, leaving business owners to focus on other important details.
3. It will enable you to protect yourself
The speed of a system like ScenGen is powerful, but it's also an incredibly sturdy shield. AI systems can take cyber security to the next level by processing every possible threat and fortifying your system in advance. Using your teams, you can operate the same way in a more general sense by, instead of searching outward for marketing possibilities and risks, searching inward for weaknesses and potential problem areas. By making sure that structural integrity is sound, business owners can fortify structures to withstand anything, giving peace of mind both to brands and their customers.
4. It can facilitate strategizing through projection
Good AI is so prescient that it almost seems psychic. The ability to process so many possible scenarios makes it spooky-good at predicting outcomes, which is valuable -- but even more valuable is planning for those outcomes. Using the predictive principles of AI to create strategies for every possible future scenario will give your business superhero skills.
5. It will encourage you to embrace the future
The biggest takeaway from looking into AI, especially with powerful systems like ScenGen, is that no matter which scenario you consider, AI is a major part of the future of business on both ends of the B2C spectrum. It's already fueling everything from advanced military strategization technology to the way Google AdWords delivers relevant ad experiences to internet users.
Indeed, AI is the future, and remaining current and abreast of every new advance therein is absolutely vital to maintaining relevance in the exponentially digitizing future. It's not going anywhere, and if you keep that in mind, neither will you.