All hail the advent of Augmented Intelligence
The impact of COVID-19 on businesses has laid bare the inter-dependencies and vulnerabilities of a connected and global landscape.
While so many facets of our lives and the economy have been disrupted in recent months, one challenge facing the business community is the overwhelming amount of news, discourse and associated risk management; companies are faced with balancing both information overload, and information scarcity. This ocean of global news and data, coupled with two of the great success stories of the last thirty years - an explosion in computational power, and the advent of machine learning - allows us to approach this new challenge through the power of artificial intelligence (AI). So how can AI help us?
AI allows businesses to surface levels of external data, information and insight that would have traditionally been inaccessible. From analyzing complex content and sentiment to categorising subject matter within documents, AI helps organize information in an understandable format, within seconds of the content being published. This is an impossible task for a human to do without technology, and eminently more effective when combined with human intelligence.
Some of the most powerful and impactful AI tools are those that help or augment the human experience. The idea of AI systems that augment human capability is known as Augmented Intelligence.
Established examples of augmented intelligence evolving today include areas where immediate insight is required over large, complex and frequently unstructured data sets. A radical shift in risk monitoring has for example become possible through AI, where businesses can track unfolding global events to predict disruption and potential crises in real-time.
The publication of regulatory information is proliferating rapidly, due to reach 300 million documents by 2023. Firms large and small are evolving their processes and the way they leverage technology to manage the volume and complexity of changes across multiple jurisdictions – from corporate reputation to tax, ESG and supply chain management.
This means that companies must determine how to streamline insights from the constantly shifting public and regulatory sentiment, and also uncover and track unfolding global news and events to predict disruption in real-time. In this way AI powers insight, and augments the decision making of the C-suite.
We live in an age where looking to non-financial measures to assess the health, quality and values of a business is critical. As stakeholder capitalism - where employees, customers and partners matter as much as shareholders - takes hold, we can look to both ourselves and to AI to help solve this problem. Quantifying trust, confidence, reputation and purpose can have a fundamental impact on the way an organization is perceived. Measuring businesses in this way is increasingly happening as investors use AI-powered monitoring tools to track the ESG activity of an organization to score company performance.
Increasingly, staying abreast of reputational risk has become a litmus test for business leaders and for the C-suite collectively, frequently including the Chief Communications Officer. Communications strategy has gone far beyond simply monitoring the news, and requires real-time insight into sentiment, public perception, and staying ahead of an increasingly dynamic external narrative.
At Signal AI, our platform captures over 5 million news and regulatory items from some 3 million sources, every day. Our AI can evaluate near-infinite pieces in real-time, as they are published. Neural machine translation software now allows communicators, agencies and PR professionals to work with news from any language in the world. Sentiment analysis means the feeling behind every piece of coverage can be automatically detected. AI-powered reach calculations give increasingly accurate estimates as to the number of people that have truly engaged with a piece of content.
Beyond monitoring keywords, our artificial intelligence is built to identify relevant and trending topics and derive connections; we recently trained our AI in the topic of Covid-19, to help businesses globally navigate their new realities. Much like human intelligence, quality artificial intelligence must continue learning new concepts to remain relevant. Here we find the mix of AI and IQ, and the resulting sweet spot of augmented intelligence.
AI is already meaningfully evolving the way we perceive and drive our businesses, from PR & Communications, reputation, risk, ESG, and supply chain risk, to tax and compliance, M&A and business development. Like so many things, Covid-19 has accelerated the need for timely and deep insights that can fuel critical business decisions as the world’s reality continues to unfold. Augmented intelligence may have arrived to take this forward just in time.
This article was contributed by Matt Brown, President, Americas & Asia-Pacific, Signal AI
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Signal AI is a fast-growing artificial intelligence company creating pioneering AI solutions to enable better decision making. It believes AI is one of the most exciting and significant technological developments of our time. Signal AI’s pioneering platform enables organisations to track defined challenges in real-time. From competitive landscape and changes in regulation to monitoring reputation or supply chain, the Signal AI platform gathers the relevant data and applies its proprietary machine learning analysis, in turn empowering smarter and faster decisions. For more information on the Signal AI platform, visit the Signal AI.
