The Rapid Increase In AI Developments

“The world is moving faster and faster. It is being driven by technology and innovation,” John Kotter, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School. As technology solidifies its place as one of the major driving forces behind business growth and development, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes a topic of particular interest for major key-decision makers. A recently published article by Cade Metz from the New York Times takes notice on how AI researchers at top companies in Silicon Valley such as Google and Facebook have been reallocated to have desks close to -if not next to- the Chief Executive Officers.

This goes to show that the big players in the technology industry are very interested in the developments happening in AI, as “the adoption of AI is accelerating as businesses see its transformational value to power new innovations and growth” said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive of technology services for Accenture, one of the leading professional services companies around the World.

A combination between this growing fascination for AI and a desire to catalyze the way in which employees resolve their inquiries and requests led to the founding of SPOKE, an AI bot that can help answer employee inquiries across various channels. SPOKE, a startup founded by 3 Google ex-employees, has already raised over $28 million from various Venture Capital firms and is teaming up with 100 companies across various sectors to test out the program, which is scheduled to launch in March of this year. “SPOKE’s technology uses artificial intelligence to figure out which existing answers in a knowledge base apply to an employee’s inquiry, and then provide better answers over time as it learns from whether people tell SPOKE if its answers adequately respond to their questions” said Jordan Novet, technology reporter at CNBC. The program can be incorporated into the platform we all know and love — Slack — but can also function as a stand-alone web app, over email, or even as a text message thread. This process of human-curated machine learning allows SPOKE to gradually become more accurate at quickly resolving inquiries and requests, which expedites tasks within companies leading to increased productivity.

SPOKE is just one of many examples of how companies are driving more and more interest towards AI centered research and development, hoping that in the future it will help drive growth in the business sector.

Written By Felipe Garcia

Emory University | EEVM | Personnel Partnerships Associate