The dawn of AI: breakthroughs and concerns

As a key technology of digitization, AI is increasingly getting involved in different areas of our everyday lives. This is because companies explore new technologies to provide customers with optimal shopping experiences and products. AI will also shape the day-to-day work itself in the future. For example, banks and insurance companies optimize their customer communication using AI. Counseling sessions are recorded and evaluated by AI. Consequently, employees are given feedback and are coached by the system.

But AI not only relieves people of their jobs, it also has the potential to completely replace jobs as its improvement progresses. For instance, Google introduced its Duplex in May 2018 at its developer conference. This enables a real dialogue between computers and humans. With Duplex’s pauses and natural irregularities, however, companies suddenly started to face fundamental, ethical issues. They raised an array of questions: Does AI need to be recognizable as such in dialogues with humans? Also, how best to protect yourself from scammers? Or when should AI deliberately break rules, for example, to safeguard safety in road traffic and thereby protect people? These are questions to which many companies, including Google, have so far inadequate answers.

When in March 2018 Zalando publicly announced that it wanted to replace 250 specialists in marketing with AI, it sparked a discussion about the future of advertising specialists. This development may seem to suggest that AI-based automation could replace occupations across all levels of education with advancing technology. Some advertising professionals believe, however, that AI is more likely to bring new opportunities. The marketing conditions would be...But what opportunities do corporations, publishers and agencies have when it comes to using AI-requiring technologies? Some publishers are already using AI technologies to tag images and analyze large amounts of relevant content. Yet, the use of AI in this industry is still expandable. Technologies like Nomotekt, for instance, are already able to mimic the peculiarities of lecturers. In this way, thousands of manuscripts can be read and evaluated within seconds. A look into other industries is worthwhile, too. For example, online retailers, most notably Amazon, use AI algorithms for customized product recommendations. Publishers should use appropriate analysis tools to address content in a targeted manner. This is because accurate content could increase the motivation to pay for online content (paywall). Well, focusing on AI over the next few years is definitely a good idea. Presumably, companies will push ahead with the use of AI technologies. Particularly large corporations, such as Bosch, Daimler and SAP, are currently investing more in AI. They aim to enable automated driving or to get more out of individual employees. Also, they want to optimize customer experiences. The quality of the data is the basis for the use of AI and is a crucial criterion for whether AI can provide added value. It is currently also open, if and to what extent, for example, Google’s AI algorithms can prevail against experienced analysts.AI is currently under construction and will therefore be discussed controversially for a while. But it’s a fact that repetitive tasks can be performed much faster by AI. Therefore, it is expected that many employees will be relieved of AI and given new, more qualified tasks. And let’s not forget that AI still needs to be trained and developed by human intelligence. According to Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, AI will reach levels of human intelligence not until 2045. In the longer term, it can therefore be assumed that qualified tasks will continue to be performed by humans (at least until 2045).