“You can teach machines to make good use of the experiences you’ve had by teaching them; but don’t forget that you were the one who educated them on what’s right and what’s wrong.”
“Even in the industrial world today, there’s a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence, but considering the competitiveness of Italian businesses, the novelty that should be discussed is a broader technological and methodological concept: Augmented Intelligence.”
The concept of Artificial Intelligence focuses on the machine, on how the machine, once equipped with almost human learning and interaction capabilities, can become capable of operating with great autonomy, even in performing very complex actions, managing to do them even better than a human. To put it in a way congenial to the industrial world, the concept of Artificial Intelligence expresses the most advanced technological contribution to the possible automation of increasingly complex human activities.
The concept of Augmented Intelligence, on the other hand, focuses on the human, on how humans, thanks to technology that enables new capabilities, can do their work more and better, that part of the activity that remains their prerogative. Augmented Intelligence solutions are not an alternative to Artificial Intelligence solutions; rather, they are a way to “incorporate” the latter into a totally rational and practicable evolutionary path for humans and their machines, based on full awareness of what remain the machine’s strengths and weaknesses, even when it is enhanced with Artificial Intelligence.
With the optimal application of all currently available technologies, Augmented Intelligence essentially serves to enrich entrepreneurial and managerial faculties, to bring them to a higher, “augmented” level, and not simply to replace decision-making or executive capabilities where they can be traced back to a subordinate level.
In a manufacturing company, for example, an Augmented Intelligence tool provides that extra level of knowledge that allows for the re-invention of more effective business management at various stages of the product lifecycle. The transition it operates (“from data to information to know-how”) does not simply translate into “automating some phases of the various processes, into doing what anyone else can do, perhaps sooner and better than us.” It aims to position itself a step ahead in the “digital re-invention,” typically in a data-driven logic, of every company activity, from product design to their commercialization, to the provision of after-sales services to customers.
In extreme summary, an Augmented Intelligence tool is what is needed today to primarily strengthen one’s distinctive competitive elements in the evolution of one’s market.
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