Pärnu Financial Conference 2017

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” -Benjamin Franklin

We, at berryBI, completely agree with this thought and try to educate ourselves at every possible opportunity and follow the current trends in the world of technology.

Thus, attending Pärnu financial conference was a wonderful opportunity to gain an overview of the tendencies in the sphere of finance and business management.

Alicia T – an Artificial Intelligence Team Member

Even though there were so many interesting topics under discussion, our attention was drawn to the Artificial Intelligence theme. Heiti Mering from Tieto introduced Alicia T – an artificial intelligence who’s a member of the management board of data-driven business unit. Its main role is to make data-driven decisions. Alicia T is equipped with conversational interface (similar principal to Apple’s Siri) and it is even possible to ask questions and receive reasonable answers. Artificial Intelligence team member has been taught machine-learning algorithms and thus Alicia T is a real expert who won’t make mistakes in the field of its competency. How is it possible? What does it mean? Will Artificial Intelligence replace human specialists in the nearest future?

Concerns and Threats

Well, as we have seen from the Tieto’s example, it is absolutely real and has demonstrated success in developing data-driven ideas. Nevertheless, there are aspects to be taken into account. For example, final decisions are still made by human beings, so it is yet impossible to solely rely on technology. Artificial Intelligence can be firstly implemented in the sphere of finance. This area is based on facts and data, thus it involves no emotions, just numbers and calculations. But if we are talking about customer service or marketing then human approach is necessary. Microsoft’s Tay may be brought here as an example of Artificial Intelligence’s misbehavior. When the bot was released on March 23, 2016 it was hard to imagine that Tay will start tweeting inappropriate messages to other users. Generally speaking, it was mimicking the negative attitude that was given to the bot and unfortunately Tay hadn’t been taught to ignore these deliberately offensive posts. So, there are really valid concerns whether it is safe to create such a smart and powerful mind that is capable of converting positive intentions into negative.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have already been in use at some stage by many organizations and it is constantly being developed and improved. Can it be named ‘evil mathematics’ or can we reach the point when Artificial Intelligence will become a threat for the humanity? There’s hardly anyone who can answer this question with 100% accuracy. But at the moment we can exploit the benefits of Artificial Intelligence in our everyday life, speed up the processes of decision-making and avoid human factor mistakes in important operations.